[Mozilla Enterprise] FF62+ Autoconfig sandbox changes (was Re: Firefox 62 Policy Template Updates Available)

[Stephen Dowdy]

So, this isn't about Policy Templates, but more about the slow whittling down on Autoconfig.
(i.e. static policy doesn't work for dynamic programmatic configuration/notifications)

Summary:
   - Debugging of "Gee, Sorry, an error occurred somewhere, contact your system administrator" for sysadmins is painful if we don't have good tools to instrument debugging in the Autoconfig setup.
   - can we at least keep "dump()" as a supported Autoconfig function, please?
     (risking that you go "oh, yeah, we forgot to remove dump() too, thanks!" on my asking this)

Just got hit by the:

     Netscape.cfg/AutoConfig failed. Please contact your system administrator.
     Error: mozilla.cfg error occurred:  failed: ReferenceError: Components is not defined

issue from doing stuff like:

     Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm");
     var moz_debug=( getenv("RAL_MOZ_DEBUG") == 1 );
     ...
     if ( moz_debug ) { Services.prompt.alert(null, "RAL DEBUG", "Hello from mozilla.cfg"); }

Okay, so fine, i can use 'displayError()' according to

     https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-autoconfig

But the dialog template generates some horrifically ugly output for just doing debug or simple alert messages to users:

    Netscape.cfg/AutoConfig failed. Please contact your system administrator.
    Error: [funcname] failed: [message]

In other words, it simply does not handle a generic user interface for notifications/diagnostics.

So, while the Release Notes state that the sandboxing will only support the functions in official Doc page, i note that it still supports:
    dump()
which is not listed.

I have a routine/mechanism in mozilla.cfg to ignore pref settings (again mostly for debugging):

     // If we get ignprefs, then redefine defaultPref() and friends to just dump() what WOULD have been done, ignoring Prefs settings
     if ( moz_ignprefs ) {
         function defaultPref(pref,value) {
           dump("RAL_MOZ_IGNPREFS: Ignore defaultPref(\""+pref+"\", "+value+");\n");
     //      for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++)
     //        dump(arguments[i]);
         }
     }

So 'dump()' is still working to write to STDERR, hoorah.   Can you guys PLEASE keep that functionality in Autoconfig so sysadmins can have some means to debug what is going on in mozilla.cfg when the user just gets "Aw, sucks to be you (and your sysadmin, too)!" type dialogs?

thanks,
--stephen

-- 
Stephen Dowdy  -  Systems Administrator  -  NCAR/RAL
303.497.2869   -  sdowdy at ucar.edu        -  http://www.ral.ucar.edu/~sdowdy/