Periodically, we field a request to add support for mochitest-chrome to
Android and B2G. To date, we've avoided this by pointing out ways that
mochitest-plain can be used for the same use case, which usually
involves SpecialPowers.
We have a new request for this, in the context of requestAutocomplete
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1021060#c16). The tests
for this, as well as some other features we've seen requests for, need
to be able to execute some setup code with chrome privileges, and
SpecialPowers isn't always flexible enough. As bholley points out,
SpecialPowers is a "best effort" and doesn't necessarily support
everything a test may wish to do.
Has the time come to bite the bullet and add mochitest-chrome support to
Android and B2G? This would be a non-trivial effort, and would need to
be done separately for Android and B2G. Adding support for this would
come at the expense of something else, possibly work related to Android
4.4 tests on emulators, work integrating our harnesses with structured
logging, and/or work on reducing our intermittent test failures on B2G.
These tasks are important and I wouldn't want to delay them without a
very clear need. Does that exist here?
Note that we are talking only about enabling harness support for
mochitest-chrome in Android and B2G in order to provide a framework for
tests that would otherwise be difficult to write. We are not talking
about taking the existing set of mochitest-chrome tests and getting them
to work in Android and B2G. Many of those tests don't apply to Android
or B2G, and for those that theoretically do, many of them won't work
because they rely on XUL files which aren't supported in B2G, and may
not be in Android (not sure on that point).
For more context about the history of mochitest-chrome on B2G, see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=797164
Jonathan
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