On 7/31/2013 4:06 AM, Brian Smith wrote:
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Mike Hommey <m...@glandium.org> wrote:
I strongly oppose to any requirement that would make ESR+2 (ESR31) not
build on the current Debian stable (gcc 4.7) and make ESR+1 (ESR24) not
build on the old Debian stable (gcc 4.4). We're not going to change the
requirements for the latter. And b2g still requires gcc 4.4 (with c++11)
support anyways. Until they switch to the same toolchain as android,
which is 4.7.
Why are you so opposed? I feel like I can give a lot of good reasons why
such constraints are a net loss for us, but I am not sure what is driving
the imposition of such constraints on us.
I agree that this constraint would have a cost for us. Since you ask,
I'll try to explain some of the benefit; then we can try to decide which
outweighs the other.
Firefox users on Linux typically depend on their distribution to provide
security updates. Needing to backport new compiler versions to old OS
releases would raise the cost for those distributors to publish Firefox
updates, possibly to the point where it is no longer feasible. If so,
Linux users might lose the ability to easily install Firefox and keep it
up to date. (They would still have the option of downloading tarballs
from ftp.mozilla.org, but this is not really something that I expect any
non-expert users will do.)
If we want Firefox for Linux to remain viable for Linux users, then we
probably need to be willing to do *some* work to make it so -- either by
supporting the compiler versions available in their distributions or by
providing our own package repositories for popular distributions (like
Google Chrome does). Otherwise we might need to tell our Linux users to
switch to Chrome if they want a usable way to install a secure browser.
Now, I don't think we need to do *quite* as much work as glandium
proposed above. For example, I think it would be enough to support just
the current Debian stable rather than the current and previous stable
versions. Users who want an up-to-date Firefox can update their
distribution. Debian doesn't keep Iceweasel up to date in oldstable anyway.
(Also: at the moment B2G is holding us back more than Debian Stable. If
we can't use the latest compiler on our *own* Linux distribution, why do
we expect other distributors to do better?)
My position is that we should be doing everything we can to improve
developer productivity
But this is clearly not an absolute, otherwise we'd do things like drop
Windows XP and OS X 10.6 support today. We are clearly willing to pay
some productivity cost in order to support a wider range of platforms,
and so we need to talk about trade-offs rather than unwavering principles.
As for whether we should care about Linux users: Just counting users is
not enough. For example, a disproportionate number of our contributors
come from the Linux world. If Firefox had not been a good browser on
Linux, I would probably not be a Firefox user or developer today.
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