On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 08:02:31AM -0700, Ryan VanderMeulen wrote: > 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 :)
Here's a thought: how about just making things work with plain msys2 and not require MozillaBuild at all anymore? We don't have a MozillaBuild for mac, we just rely on homebrew or whatever else. Why not just aim for the same? What, in a msys2-based MozillaBuild would not come from msys2? The environment scripts to find msvc? I'd argue that could/should be handled by the build system. Mike _______________________________________________ dev-builds mailing list dev-builds@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-builds
