Improve the makefile

[pyllyukko]

• Fix the parallelism issue README: refactor addons section; other fixes; fix GEOLOCATION/QUIET FOX sections of #208 #255 (review)
  • 4edca10
• Add a check that will list values that match the defaults (just a curiosity)
• Test that the value is of correct type (string/int/boolean)
• add a target to compare added/removed preferences between 2 firefox versions
• add a target to compare preferences and their values against an arbitrary user.js file/URL
• add a target to compare this user.js against Tor Browser Bundle This project and Tor Browser without Tor #316
• Improve gen-readme.sh to detect paragraphs where all lines are commented out (hence a disabled pref), and not output README entries when the pref is disabled. This would prevent having ot use workarounds like https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/pull/296/files and will make diffs easier to read when master/relaxed branch start to diverge more, as well as comparing against other forks.

[nodiscc]

• add a target to compare added/removed preferences between 2 firefox versions
• add a target to compare preferences and their values against an arbitrary user.js file/URL
• add a target to compare this user.js against Tor Browser Bundle This project and Tor Browser without Tor #316

[pyllyukko]

add a target to compare preferences and their values against an arbitrary user.js file/URL

I think compare-user.js does a decent job regarding this.

[nodiscc]

My main grief with compare-user.js is that it requires a full node.js stack for something relatively simple.

[nodiscc]

• Improve gen-readme.sh to detect paragraphs where all lines are commented out (hence a disabled pref), and not output README entries when the pref is disabled. This would prevent having ot use workarounds like https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/pull/296/files and will make diffs easier to read when master/relaxed branch start to diverge more, as well as comparing against other forks.

[pyllyukko]

We could try to utilize Awk's records.

Something like:

$ gawk 'BEGIN { RS = "\n// PREF: " }NR>1{ print "Record #", NR-1; print}' user.js
Record # 1
Disable Service Workers
// https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Worker
// https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ServiceWorker_API
// https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Push_Notifications#Service_Workers
// NOTICE: Disabling ServiceWorkers breaks functionality on some sites (Google Street View...)
// Unknown security implications
// CVE-2016-5259, CVE-2016-2812, CVE-2016-1949, CVE-2016-5287 (fixed)
user_pref("dom.serviceWorkers.enabled",				false);

Record # 2
Disable Web Workers
// https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Using_web_workers
// https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_webworkers.asp
user_pref("dom.workers.enabled",					false);

...

[pyllyukko]

I think we should also check, that the values are of correct type to avoid bugs like #30.

[pyllyukko]

add a target to compare this user.js against Tor Browser Bundle #316

d0b7859

[nodiscc]

• The new tbb-diff target should probably discard preferences that have been ignored on purpose in ignore.list. What do you think?

Very nice feature otherwise, and it could probably be extended to cover other user.js variants. I'd like to

• List a few interesting user.js variants in a new section in https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js#references
• Attach to each one a link to an automated diff (Travis job?) against pyllyukko/user.js.
• Use this automatic diff to track progress on studying the other projects instead of having huge, hard to manage lists like ghacks user.js monster diff #208.

[pyllyukko]

The new tbb-diff target should probably discard preferences that have been ignored on purpose in ignore.list. What do you think?

True that. Need to think about the best way to do it.

Very nice feature otherwise, and it could probably be extended to cover other user.js variants. I'd like to

• List a few interesting user.js variants in a new section in https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js#references
• Attach to each one a link to an automated diff (Travis job?) against pyllyukko/user.js.
• Use this automatic diff to track progress on studying the other projects instead of having huge, hard to manage lists like ghacks user.js monster diff #208.

We could start by implementing functionality, that takes the other user.js as a parameter.

[nodiscc]

I think the makefile-based solution will start being hard to maintain if we want to add more sources for comparison. I'd like to work on something python-based in the few coming months. I'll keep this issue updated.

[pyllyukko]

I'd like to work on something python-based in the few coming months. I'll keep this issue updated.

Sound good. Thanks in advance!