On 1/21/2014, 4:27 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 10:44 PM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Our Firefox OS partners occasionally need to expose new APIs to Firefox OS
devices for things such as testing and diagnostics purposes.
What's that more concretely? "Testing and diagnostics" sounds like an
euphemism for Carrier IQ-like things, which would be privacy and
brand-sensitive.
It could be anything really. Apparently it's common practice for
vendors to include special hidden applications which directly talks to
some hardware on the device, sending it various commands and reading
various values out. These kinds of special purpose applications are
used in certification and also for diagnosing problems when a customer
brings the device in for repair. Note that the above may not be an
exhaustive list of the cases where a partner may need to implement new APIs.
I agree that such APIs can be privacy and brand-sensitive, but that is
orthogonal to the purpose of my question here. I'm looking for ways to
enable partners do this kind of thing more easily and more securely, to
ensure that for example they don't end up exposing the API to
non-certified contexts, etc. I'm not proposing implementing something
which makes it impossible to make incorrect changes to Gecko here.
In general, though, it seems to me that having partners patch Gecko is
bad in the sense that it makes it harder to move to a future where the
device vendor ships Gonk (analogous to Android) and Mozilla ships
Gecko updates (analogous to Google Play Services). Have we given up on
getting to a future where Mozilla ships Gecko updates and Firefox OS
users get an up-to-date Gecko from Mozilla the way desktop and Android
users do?
I'm unaware of our plans for doing that, but indeed that sounds very
hard if not impossible as long as Gecko modifications are permitted. Do
you know who would be the right person to ask about the plans you're
referring to?
Thanks!
Ehsan
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