On Friday 2016-04-29 10:43 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote: > On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Jeff Walden <jwalden+...@mit.edu> wrote: > > On 04/28/2016 10:00 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote: > >> Thoughts? > > > > Another option is to ship a WinXP-specific Firefox build that doesn't > > provide ICU and ECMAScript's Intl functionality. > > I'm very opposed to this (unless the XP-specific thing isn't actually > XP-specific but 45 ESR delivered to XP over the normal "release" AUS > channel). > > With ESR, we practically already committed to supporting XP about > three years past Microsoft stopping security patches for IE and XP > itself and the year past Google stopping security patches for Chrome > on XP. At a time when we should be focusing our resources on being > competitive on the platforms that will be relevant going forward, it > makes no sense for us to put even more resources into supporting XP. > > Also, I think we should stop talking about ICU as if it was only the > back end for the ECMAScript Intl API. Given that we have ICU for that, > we should be actively getting rid of Netscape-era code for the C++ > consumers of the same functionality that is exposed to JS via the > ECMAScript Intl API. That is, we should be get rid of non-ICU > collation and normalization, for example, by first making nsICollation > ICU-backed only and then flattening nsICollation callers to call ICU > collation directly. (Until such time that the Rust ecosystem grows a > pure-Rust library that can replace ICU as the back end of the > ECMAScript Intl API.)
I still find it sad that ECMAScript Intl came (as I understand it) very close to just standardizing on a piece of software (ICU), and also find it disturbing that we're going to extend that standardization on a particular piece of software (possibly even more rigidly) into other areas. I think many of the arguments we made against standardizing on SQLite seem to apply to ICU as well, such as security risk and needing to reverse-engineer when writing future implementations of parts of the Web platform. While I expect that some of the features that Intl provides (from ICU data) are worthwhile in terms of codesize, I'm certainly not confident that they all are. I have similar worries about other large chunks of code that land in our tree... And when I say worthwhile, I'm talking not just about whether the feature is intrinsically valuable, but whether it's actually going to be used by Web developers to get that value to users. > > Given it's WinXP only (and Firefox for Android's recalcitrance ;-) > > I think the situation where Firefox for Android is holding back > Gecko's ability to improve the codebase by getting rid of Netscape-era > code makes no sense, either. I think a Platform should put its foot > down and refuse letting Gecko development be handcuffed like this. > Taking the Android situation is a permit to introduce more build > configurations that omit ICU is entirely backwards. > > So I think we should take option a': Drop XP and Snow Leopard support > on trunk and push ESR builds to the non-ESR update channel on XP and > Snow Leopard through the life of 45 ESR. I think enough of our users are on Windows XP that decisions about dropping Windows XP are not a purely engineering decision. (Do we still have more Windows XP users than we have on all non-Windows platforms combined?) Pushing those users to ESR without buy-in from all parts of the organization will likely lead to worse engineering problems than having to support XP (e.g., having to support 45ESR substantially longer). How much value does ICU get from dropping Windows XP support? Can we push back on their plans to do so, at least for the parts that we use? (It also seems to be that we need to answer the question, already raised in this thread, about whether the parts that are expensive for them to support intersect at all with the parts that we use.) -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
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