Bundling Libraries filesize and addons-linter

[erosman]

While Firefox has no issues with large files sizes in extensions pages (except background script which is limited to 4 MB), addons-linter has a max filesize of 5 MB and wont allow uploading otherwise.

When testing the bundling of a package, it generates a file that is 6 MB.

File is too large to parse.

Error: This file is not binary and is too large to parse. Files larger than 5MB will not be parsed. Consider moving large lists of data out of JavaScript files and into JSON files, or splitting very large files into smaller ones.

It is worth mentioning that the above 6 MB file has around 2.9 MB of comments and manually removing the comments will reduce it to 3.1 MB. However, that is not an option since bundled scripts are required to be an exact match of the output of the bundling script.
The same 6 MB file zipped is only 1.4 MB.

I have been in discussions with bundling script developers to find a solution but no result so far.

Please consider the following:

• Inconsistency: Chrome Web-store and Chrome browser do not have such limit
• Bundling libraries will remain a part of extension developments and their use are likely to increase
• The issue is likely to exacerbate over time
• Machine-generated code will have to be checked by the addon review team nonetheless
• Addon review team require an exact checksum match with the bundling script output
• The included bundle will not be checked/parsed and the addon review team will check the original unbundled source
• Parsing machine-generated code by the addon-linter serves little or no purpose
• Limiting files size will hamper extension developments
• addon-linter is not expected to process very large files

IMHO, the following suggestions could be considered:

• Apply the 5 MB limit to the background script only (not the extension pages)
• Increase file size limit to 10 MB for the time being
• Use zipped filesize for the criteria (instead of the unzipped filesize)
• it would be more practical to leave large files for the addon review team, and not prevent the uploading of extensions

See also:
Request to Increase Extension Upload File Size Limit