On 11/25/12 05:21 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote: > I understand the concerns about developer efforts. Can we please > re-enable these builds, stash them somewhere obscure so that no-one > will ever unintentionally stumble across them, and slap a giant > warning on them saying "no support, no promises, no nothing, use at > your own risk"?
There is a _real_ non-negligible cost (both to RelEng and developers) here. Further, it will not work for very long without requiring people to divert attention away from shipping products to keep them up and running. On the RelEng side: In order to have builds that work at all, they need to be shown on TBPL. 64-bit Windows are not shown on TBPL because we don't do enough builds of them to have decent regression ranges. In order to do enough builds to have decent regression ranges we need to enable them on mozilla-inbound. In order to do that, we need to suck resources away from 32-bit Windows builds that are actually a shipping product. We also need to worry about things like compiler, SDK, or other tool upgrades breaking them. Complicating that testing matrix means that we move slower for things that affect a shipping product because of a non-shipping one. On the developer side: What do you do the first time they turn red and someone files a "64-bit builds are broken!!!!" bug? What priority do you treat it at is? If it's a non-obvious problem, how do you justify spending time debugging it vs. working on supported products? If it burns for a week (or two weeks) before somebody fixes, it will still eat up considerable machine time (depending how far into the build it fails) that could be used for 32-bit Windows builds or other jobs - which means regression ranges on those platforms get larger. This is not even a "what if", this is a common scenario for anything not shown on TBPL. The cost of just re-enabling these builds with a "no support" sticker on them is higher than most people think. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
