As some of you on this list are already aware of, I have recently been toying with the idea of overhauling MozillaBuild. I'm sending this message out to flesh out the plan more and collect some early feedback before moving forward formally with this.
As I see it, the current MozillaBuild has a few problems: * High barrier of entry for new contributors due to requiring a specialized build setup (or a custom VM image) to package * Difficulty updating core components due to being pinned to an extremely old revision of MSYS (version 1.0.11) - This leaves us unable to fix bugs like bug 703986 without jumping through hoops to do so * Inability to ship small incremental updates (even an update to just Hg requires a full 80+MB release) * Difficulty including git due to side-by-side MSYS versions I think that the above issues are largely fixable, but difficult without a more extensive rebuild of MozillaBuild. Therefore, I would like to take this on as a Q2 project. The rewrite would be based around MSYS2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/), a more recent cygwin fork. MSYS2 offers many nice improvements to the current MSYS: * A built-in package manager (ported from Arch Linux - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/pacman), enabling smaller updates of core components. * Native builds of many core components included with MozillaBuild (or on the wish list), like Hg, git, python, etc. No more side-by-side installations, py2win, or other ugliness. * Includes the mintty terminal, a very capable improvement over the native Windows command line. In the end, I think the rebuilt MozillaBuild will end up being simpler than the current setup. Easier to package, easier to update, and easier to customize. Let me know what you think :) -Ryan _______________________________________________ dev-builds mailing list dev-builds@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-builds
