NotExportedFromLaunchpad error on user XPI upload

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen]

A user complains that after uploading an XPI file (as a user upload, not a published one) the import is rejected with "File was not exported from Launchpad."

The reason is that for user uploads, we require the date at which a file was exported from Launchpad so that we can check for conflicting changes (as well as, I suppose, files that might inconsiderately overwrite translations in Launchpad with unrelated ones). But in an XPI file we have no timestamp to represent the Launchpad export date, and so a user upload always fails.

If we wanted to do a similar check in Launchpad, we currently only have two relevant dates to use: "now" and a last-change time we could possibly derive from file metadata inside the XPI archive. The latter would be unreliable (because of timezones and perhaps clock skew) and arbitrary (because there's no reason to believe the author checked for conflicts with Launchpad just at that moment). We could use "now," which effectively disables the check and lets an import overwrite changes in Launchpad. But translations that were unchanged from a very old version of the XPI would appear as "changed" to Launchpad.

Other options would be:
 * Sneak our custom timestamp header field into the RDF when converting XPIPO to XPI.
 * Disallow XPI user uploads, and maybe support XPIPO instead.

The XPI file in question is at http://launchpadlibrarian.net/50473591/ug.xpi

[Henning Eggers (henninge)]

How urgent is this seeing that we currently don't use Firefox translations anyway? I tend to disallow these kind of uploads all together. At UDS-M we agreed on a different workflow instead of improving xpi support:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-maverick-native-xpi-lp-export

[David Planella (dpm)]

El dl 21 de 06 de 2010 a les 15:00 +0000, en/na Henning Eggers va
escriure:
> How urgent is this seeing that we currently don't use Firefox translations anyway? I tend to disallow these kind of uploads all together. At UDS-M we agreed on a different workflow instead of improving xpi support:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-maverick-native-xpi-lp-export
>

I'm not sure how urgent this is, but people do stumble upon it. Here are
two recent examples:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-translators/2010-June/003712.html
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu-translations/+question/102816

Ideally, we'd support this, but until we reach a conclusion on the
implementation and until it can be actually implemented, would it not
make more sense to disable the uploads for XPI templates?

As per the native XPI export spec, Arne, can you remind us about the
status? What were the conclusions from the discussion? Is this something
that will be addressed in the Maverick cycle?