As suggested by Brian in bug 1188413 comment 7, it would be great to aumatically load devtools from sources instead of jar package when we launch it from ./mach. So that, we can immediately reload the tools from the sources without having to restart/rebuild. We may hide that behind the chrome pref to not enable this behavior for everyone. Also we would have to wait before doing that as the "loading devtools from source directory" is still broken in various cases like gcli/webIDE (at least).

Tweak mach to pass the topsrcdir. I looked at existing env variable and haven't seen anything useful. There is PWD, which will often be topsrcdir, but not always I imagine... I haven't looked into Directory Service XPCOM, but I don't think we have the source dir here. Otherwise, regarding devtools patch, I kept this hidden behind chrome pref, but I tend to think we should load from source by default? (especially once we are confident about loading from source behavior).

Before proceeding with this patch, I would like to go through most features/panels and see if everything works. For example, WebIDE has always been completely broken. I'm wondering if browser toolbox works also. And what about all by-default-hidden tools?

Rebased.

I'll try this out soon and see how it goes.

This is still in my queue to try and think about, sorry for the delay.

Comment on attachment 8668530 [details] [diff] [review] patch v2 Review of attachment 8668530 [details] [diff] [review]: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Okay, I finally had time to try this. I think this generally works well. What are you current thoughts on this approach? Do you prefer your add-on plan instead of this?

Also, if we were to recommend something like this as the "default workflow", I think it might be best to eliminate as much preprocessing as we can first, to avoid surprises. Or at least very clearly state all known edge cases where it may fail.

We were talking in Orlando, and it sounds like people would like to have this. Alex, what do you think?

I should morph this patch into registering the devtools addon as it cover much more ressources. But we should first ensure more people in our team actually use that manually to highlight the possibly hidden breakages of it. The addon workflow is going to open new completely different workflow of contribution, may be we can start with that. It is more appealing than this loader trick. I plan to setup a group within devtools team to start playing with that.

mach could potentially auto-install the add-on for you, since the add-on is currently temporary.

I've been using the "text file inside extensions dir" hack with this, which keeps the reload add-on installed, pretty nice. However what did trip me up once was having multiple source checkouts, but only one profile, so the profile can end up pointing to the wrong checkout via the text file.

I would prefer to work on bug 1185460, which would benefit to more people and make the original experience better. I'm still anxious in making the addon codepath become the default one.