On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 11:19 AM Ben Cotton <bcot...@redhat.com> wrote: > > An example of a package that could benefit from this policy is > Firefox. Upstream, the Firefox project builds primarily with > Clang/LLVM. Yet we force the Fedora package owner to find and fix > issues building with GCC then either carry those custom fixes forward > in Fedora or negotiate with upstream to get those changes upstreamed. > While this process can be helpful in finding non-portable code, this > is ultimately a poor use of the packager's time. > > Additionally Fedora loses the benefit of the testing provided by other > distributions where Firefox is compiled in the same way as the > upstream project -- when issues arise the Fedora team must consider > the possibility that the problem is due to using GCC instead of > Clang/LLVM or the patches to make that possible. Again, this is a > poor use of Fedora developer's time. >
This is not a good reason for changing the default compiler. This makes it sound like Fedora alone is building Firefox with GCC, which is not the case. If anything, *most* Linux distributions build it with GCC. Even if I grant the idea that using Clang is "better", our builds would not be very close to Mozilla's because we use different compiler flags, system libraries, crypto policies, etc. To me, this sounds like an excuse to avoid doing the right thing and leveraging the toolchain that offers the highest quality code generation (performance, security, etc.). To be clear, I'm not necessarily outright saying this policy change is bad, but the reasoning is weak and you're not providing a compelling case for it. Fedora is known as the distribution where the folks working on it help drive technical excellence in other projects, and this sounds like you want to give up on that in this case. I'm not particularly enthused by this Change if that's the kind of rationale I would get for people switching compiler stacks. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
