Copying to -support because people there might have useful observations. If you are not subscribed to both -dev and -support, please only reply to the one you are subscribed to. This is a bit long, please trim your replies to concentrate on the parts you are commenting on.
Background: For a long time I've been looking at some beta releases of firefox to try to keep abreast of what will need to change (both to use the patch, which I find useful, and also to spot mozconfig or dependency changes). In particular this tells me when the book's version `of rustc is no longer adequate, and at those times I try to use the latest version. Firefox-70 is one of those times. I'll also mention, before I again forget, that 70 will require new profiles which I always find a PITA. Looking back at rustc, I see that we had to update for (I think) firefox-53 (rustc-1.16.0), 56 (1.19.0), 58 (needed 1.21.0, used 1.22.1), 60 (used 1.25.0), 65 (used 1.32.0), 68.0 (used 1.35.0 - for that version of rustc somebody found a patch for thunderbird). However, on this occasion there are two further considerations. First, firefox is moving to a faster release cycle. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/moving-firefox-to-a-faster-4-week-release-cycle Given the number of non-security point releases for the current 6-7 week cycle, that does not give me any confidence. I have no idea where firefox development is going, but I suspect that moves to better support Wayland, and to offload some things to (some) GPUs will happen. But does anybody here care ? A lot of Quantum changes happened between the 60esr series and 68, but it seems to me that 68esr is now (for my use) as good as 69 or 70beta. Second, thunderbird releases track firefox-ESR. At the moment, the current thunderbird does not compile with latest rustc-1.38.0 : error[E0506]: cannot assign to `self.input.cached_token` because it is borrowed although it does build with both 1.35.0 and 1.37.0. I suspect that this might not get fixed by the few people maintaining thunderbird, but that is just a guess. Alternatively, since 1.38.0 has only been out for a few days it will perhaps get fixed in thunderbird by a distro. So, I'm suggesting that maybe we should move from 'current' firefox to ESR versions, which I am hoping will allow us to keep one version of rustc. There seems to be a slight overlap between old and new ESR versions, I'm guessing that once a 78 version of thunderbird is out (June to August next year) we can then pick up up all the changes. But I'd particularly like to hear comments from anyone who thinks that doing this will mean we miss out on something which is expected to arrive in the non-ESR firefox shortly. The alternative is that we update rustc to 1.37.0 and use firefox-70.0 when that gets released in three weeks time, hoping that we can then continue to build thunderbird whenever firefox next needs a newer version of rustc. There are a number of downsides: 1. We fall behind current which is supposedly stable. My personal opinion is that it is a bit too close to bleeding-edge. 2. Clearly, getting rid of python2 will happen first in the main release, but I suspect that will still be after python2 is out of support (unless mozilla *really* get their skates on). There are also some possible upsides: 1. Slightly fewer updates. In the interests of security I aim to continue to pick up security releases ASAP, but some of the recent point releases in current have not been for security fixes. Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ - Since 68.0 came out (the start of the current ESR) there have been two point releases for 68, and then the new 69 with one point release, but only one new ESR (68.1.0). Looking at the previous ESR (60), it seemed to only need about half of the point releases applied from 61.0.1 to 68.0.2. 2. Less churn in the dependencies and the mozconfig. 3. We can stop tracking updates to cbindgen (not a big deal). Some distros seem to only use the current release, others offer both firefox and firefox-esr. For a binary distro, having multiple versions of rustc is not a problem, but for building from source it is a PITA (and yes, on my current machine I have 1.35.0, 1.37.0 and 1.38.0 for testing, but I can only use one at a time). And you can only run one of firefox or firefox-esr. I don't think that we can support both. Comments welcome. ĸen -- thread 'main' panicked at 'giraffe', /tmp/rustc-1.32.0-src/src/test/run-fail/while-panic.rs:17:13 -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
