incorporate A-team's prefs list to allow fx to startup faster for testing / dev cycles

gregglind commented 7 years ago

Is this a bug or feature request?

Feature Request

What is the current behavior?

Automated testing should be awesome and fast. Currently lauching fx and getting to addon-startup is a slow thing.

What is the expected or desired behavior?

Overall goal: no roadblocks to writing tests, to improve fx addon code quality, and make the lives of QA easier.

Proposed step forward / subgoal: fx starts up quicker so test runs cycle is shorter.

Version information (for bug reports)

n/a

Possible paths / implementations

use the a-team list at https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/profiles/prefs_general.js?q=path%3Aprefs_general.js&redirect_type=single to speed up / skip lots of Fx stuff (reporting, checking for updates, etc.)
headless fx on all platforms if needful?
lots of other clever stuff.

Pitfalls / details

as shown, this ALSO turns off most remote services, which might not be wanted by all authors.
maybe this could be offered as a --prefs = ateam default or such? or alt: --prefs=localonly,fast or such.
simpler, just publish the list somewhere gistable :)

jmaher commented 7 years ago

one other option is to use this in coordination with mozprocess/mozprofile or the parent class mozrunner. We have some documentation on our modules: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Auto-tools/Projects/MozBase

In fact many projects out of the mozilla-central repo use mozbase or specific modules. That helps manage testing on all operating systems without having to think about process management on windows vs osx vs linux.

If that is too much overhead, just taking these preferences would be a good start- ideally getting some kind of notification when they change (or worse case diff your copy vs in-tree every week).

gregglind commented 7 years ago

A simple conversion script and result is at https://gist.github.com/gregglind/b2dfb9dce501a87d84e998aca102b37a

kumar303 commented 7 years ago

Thanks @gregglind , this list of pref optimization is awesome! I think we have some of them but we should definitely add more as long as they won't conflict with manual exploration that someone might do in Firefox while trying out their extension.

mozilla / web-ext