February 22-26 saw the build team gathered in San Francisco to discuss all the work that is required to speed up developer ergonomics around building Firefox.
After discussing all the major items of work we want to work on in the first half of this year (of which there are many), we started working on replacing the Autoconf configure script. We are planning to replace the old shell and m4 code with sandboxed python, which will allow us to have improved performance (especially on Windows), parallel configure checks, better caching, and improved maintainability. We have also added more support for artifact builds <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Artifact_builds>. If you use Git as part of your Firefox development, you will now be able to get the latest artifacts for your builds. This will benefit anyone not currently working on C++ code in Mozilla-Central. Support for C++ developers will be worked on later in the year. We were also able to add more data points to the telemetry work. This is still in development and being beta tested by Engineering Productivity before we ask for more people to submit their build data. There was also work to see if we can get speed ups by using different versions of compilers. We are noticing huge gains by upgrading to newer versions but some of the upgrades require some work before we can deploy them. When we are looking to do the upgrade we will email the list to warn you. David Burns _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
