Thank you. This will make my development flow much easier.
On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 12:09:36AM -0500, Tom Ritter wrote:
Previous Thread:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/r3mYWbb42pM
As of a few hours ago, there is a new Tier 2 MinGW build on TaskCluster.
It's in the 'Windows MinGW all' line, with the group WMC64 for 'Windows
MinGW Clang x64'.
The MinGW builds are part of the Tor Uplift project, where we work closely
with Tor to upstream their patches and in general move Tor Browser closer
and closer to 'Firefox with Addons and Pref Changes' - instead of a fork of
Firefox with a bunch of custom patches.
Tor is currently using ESR releases: the bump to ESR60 (which occurred last
week! It's a huge release for them with a lot of UX improvements:
https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-80 ) was a lot smoother
- build-wise - than other bumps because we had the MinGW build running in
TC. Without keeping the MinGW build working, every ESR they have to go
through a potentially colossal amount of work on a short timescale to get
the build working under MinGW again. By minimizing their effort in fixing
the build, rebasing patches and the like - we can free up their limited
resources to continue to research and experiment on privacy technology like
First Party Isolation and Fingerprinting Resistance.
Now, you might be wondering "I thought we had a MinGW build?" We did. But
we had to disable it. Shortly after 60 went to beta, we removed support for
--disable-stylo. Stylo requires libclang to build; and getting that working
with MinGW was very complicated (see
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1390583) so MinGW fell behind
and had to be disabled.
However, thanks (again) to the efforts of all the reviewers, build peers,
and especially Jacek Caban - we've been able to re-enable a MinGW build.
We are now building with clang using the MinGW headers. (Previously it was
gcc.) I believe we're the first 'real' project that is building with
MinGW-clang, and Tor will be the first major project to ship it (but I
could be wrong there.)
In configure and moz.build files, CC_TYPE will be 'clang-cl' for our normal
Windows builds (which build on Windows) and will be 'clang' for the
MinGW-clang builds (which build on Linux).
There are still some outstanding issues: I hope to land a x86 build, we
need to remove some of the --disable-foo flags, and once ESR60 gets a NSS
uplift I intend the backport the jobs there also. We hope to get pdbs
generating so we can debug easier - major appreciation to David Major and
Bob Owen who both have debugged pretty ugly crashes without symbols.
Eventually, I'd like to enable a limited set of tests to catch browser
crashes. Because there is no path forward for getting the MinGW gcc builds
re-enabled (nor anyone who wants to work on it...) I intend to remove the
(disabled) build jobs from the tree also. And finally I need to document
how to get a local build environment for it.
MinGW is Tier 2, and sometimes breaking it is unavoidable because the fix
needs to happen upstream in MinGW. Other times breaking it is avoidable,
and one just needs to special-case it. The Tor Uplift team and Tor
themselves greatly appreciate all of your efforts to keep the build green.
As always, if you have a MinGW question or a build error you can't quite
understand - feel free to reach out to me via irc or email.
--
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
students that have had prior exposure to Basic; as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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