On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 01:06:27PM +0200, Brian Smith wrote: > > On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote: > > > > > I strongly oppose to any requirement that would make ESR+2 (ESR31) > > > not build on the current Debian stable (gcc 4.7) and make ESR+1 > > > (ESR24) not build on the old Debian stable (gcc 4.4). We're not > > > going to change the requirements for the latter. And b2g still > > > requires gcc 4.4 (with c++11) support anyways. Until they switch to > > > the same toolchain as android, which is 4.7. > > > > Why are you so opposed? I feel like I can give a lot of good reasons > > why such constraints are a net loss for us, but I am not sure what is > > driving the imposition of such constraints on us. > > Because Mozilla is not the only entity that builds and distributes > Gecko-derived products, including Firefox, and that we can't demand > everyone to be using the latest shiny compiler. > You are not answering the question. You are just making your assertion in a different way. First of all, when we created ESR, there was the understanding that ESR-related concerns would not hold back the mainline development. Any discussion about ESR in the context of what we use for *mozilla-central* is going against our original agreements for ESR. FWIW, I talked about this issue with a group of ~10 Mozillians here in Berlin and all of them (AFAICT) were in favor of requiring that the latest versions of GCC be used, or even dropping GCC support completely in favor of clang, if it means that we can use more C++ language features and if it means we can avoid wasting time writing polyfills. Nobody saw installing a new version of GCC as part of the build environment as being a significant impediment. Everybody using Windows or Windows as their development environment has to download and install a multitude of programs and libraries in order to build Gecko. I've never heard of a justification for why Linux needs to be different. And, in fact, except for the compiler/linker/etc., Linux isn't different; that's why we have bootstrap.py that downloads and installs a bunch of stuff for Linux too. Why should only the compiler (including linker, etc.) only on Linux be treated specially? What justifies the reduced productivity that results from us wasting time writing unnecessary polyfills and/or writing worse code to avoid language features that aren't supported on some particular Linux distribution's version of GCC? How many developers working on Firefox are even using Debian as their development platform? What percentage of Firefox users are using Firefox on Debian? My position is that we should be doing everything we can to improve developer productivity, and that means using the best possible tools we have available to us. I have a hard time seeing how any Linux distributions' policies could possibly be more important than our productivity. Cheers, Brian _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
