[HTTPS-Everywhere] Replacing the rulesets database file

[Jacob S Hoffman-Andrews]

On 08/11/2014 03:10 PM, Lunar wrote:
> Jacob S Hoffman-Andrews:
>> I think we should not try to ship a different format for updates than we
>> ship with releases. I think we're likely to wind up with people whose DBs
>> are in strange intermediate states that are broken and hard to debug. The
>> rulesets.sqlite file is small enough that it's reasonable to always ship the
>> whole thing.
> Would it be crazy to not ship rulesets.sqlite with the extension and
> have the code bootstrap it by the same process as an update (from the
> empty set)?
I was thinking of the same thing. Two problems:
  - The Tor Browser Bundle ships with HTTPS Everywhere preloaded, 
and probably wants the rules preloaded too, since they could take 
some time to download over Tor. We don't want to diverge too far 
from the version shipped with TBB.

  - It creates a possibility that the user could make a request 
after HTTPS Everywhere is installed, but before the rules are 
loaded. We could prevent all such requests, but it would be awkward.

I think the only gain from this approach would be that the time from 
starting the download to installing the extension would be less. But 
after installing the extension, the user has to restart the browser 
and wait while the extension downloads the rulesets. We'd rather let 
them do that waiting before restarting their browser, when they can 
still be browsing to other web sites if they want.