[tl;dr: if a legacy addon is “experimental”, and hasn’t been updated since prior to August 2016, does that mean that it has only ever passed the old “preliminary review” process? If so, and an updated version is submitted, and it fails the new more strict review, could that result in all versions being removed from AMO?]
Hi, I’m looking into the process for a minor update to the legacy Dorando Keyconfig addon, which is currently listed as “experimental”. Specifically I want to know if there’s a chance that the current review process might reject it, and result in the addon being completely removed from AMO?
As I understand from this Mozilla Blog post, since August 2016 there’s no difference between the “experimental” and “full review” process anymore. The last time Keyconfig was updated was March 2016, so it would have gone through the more lenient “preliminary review”.
[Edit: unless all existing “experimental” addons were later put through the new review process, even if they weren’t updated? In that case, it’s not a problem…]
Keyconfig is an important addon with a long history, is recommended on the Mozilla support website, and currently is the only viable solution to prevent data loss in Thunderbird due to single-key shortcuts.
There are some changes required to support Thunderbird 57 and later, so an update is needed. There’s a new volunteer who’s willing to work on it. But at the moment it’s not clear whether there might be some unknown fundamental aspect of the addon that may cause it to fail the current review, and that can’t easily be remedied, or may require heavily rewriting it.
Should new updates just be submitted with the “experimental” tag removed, and is there any danger in doing so, that it might be completely removed from AMO if it fails the review? Or might it be better to leave the current version on AMO, which is still working for Firefox non-Quantum, and offer a separate unsigned update for Thunderbird elsewhere?
The source code is in the Github repository in case anyone wants to have a quick look and see if there’s anything obvious that would cause it to fail the review.