On 2014-03-12, 5:57 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
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.
Does msys2 come with a decent package manager by default? Having to end
up with installing prerequisites manually would be a shame. Unless
there is something better that we can do through the mach bootstrap script?
If that can be taken care of, I think this is a great idea!
Cheers,
Ehsan
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