On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 02:28:30PM +0800, Philip Chee wrote: > On 03/01/2015 04:22, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: > > > To me, the default answer to whether we should keep supporting MSVC2012 > > is "no", merely because it will require time and effort that will not > > directly benefit our users as we do not use that compiler to release > > Firefox. That is, without someone coming up with a good reason > > otherwise, we should drop it. And not having it locally installed is > > not a good reason. :-) > > To me, the default answer to whether we should keep supporting MinGW > is "no", merely because it will require time and effort that will not > directly benefit our users as we do not use that compiler to release > Firefox. That is, without someone coming up with a good reason > otherwise, we should drop it. And not having it locally installed is > not a good reason. :-)
There is a big difference, though. There is a benefit from compiling with mingw, in that it's a free/libre toolchain, which MSVC isn't. People who do want to build Firefox or a Gecko-based product can do so without using a proprietary compiler. This has value to a lot of people. But once you have to choose between one version of a proprietary compiler and another, there is no such difference anymore. Note that we regularly break mingw builds, probably much more often than we've broken MSVC 2012 builds, and we still accept fixes for those breakages. The situation is no different with MSVC 2012. Now, the question whether it's worth bothering with MSVC 2012 fixes is an interesting one, because of that lack of philosophical difference between 2012 and 2013. If you've come your way to install 2012, you can just as well upgrade to 2013. The benefit is better support for modern C++. And that, combined with the fact that 2012 has never been a toolchain we use on automation, make a case for dropping support for 2012. Looking at it another way, the only reason I can see that people are currently using 2012 is that they wanted something more modern than 2010 for some reason (I guess there are IDE changes that are worth?). They've had to endure build failures from time to time because 2012 was not what's used on automation. I don't think anyone in their right mind would have installed 2012 after we dropped support for 2010, because the current version was 2013 at the time, and what's the point to upgrade if it's not for the current version? So, keeping support for 2012 is essentially keeping support for people that decided to upgrade before everyone for some reason. They've had a long run, they can be forced to upgrade now. Mike _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
