On Thursday 2013-08-15 14:11 -0700, Gregory Szorc wrote: > I feel that having developers develop on the same toolchain as > official builds (producing bit-identical builds if possible) would > cut down on patch development costs due to reducing the frequency of > failures resulting from discrepancies between the build > environments.
It also increases the costs of upgrading the toolchain and the costs of porting to new environments. Furthermore, it reduces the chance that we'll quickly catch real bugs in our code that only show up on some toolchains. Catching bugs quickly greatly reduces the cost of fixing them since the code is fresh in its author's mind. > If nothing else, having the toolchain remain in sync with something > in the tree gives you the ability to go back and reproduce any old > build. If we could easily reproduce builds over time, this would > make a whole host of problems (such as bisecting, long-term > analysis, decisions over data retention, etc) a lot easier. I think being able to reproduce things like nightlies is different from what we should force on developers. > Let me rephrase your concern: if we could easily reproduce the > official build environment on a developer's machine such that the > discrepancy for build differences is minimized, why shouldn't we do > that by default? I think it's great to enable that, but I think it's bad to require it, and I'd be somewhat concerned if everybody were using it. > About the only downside I can think of is lesser > support for "other" build environments. But at the end of the day, > Mozilla is only producing builds from N configurations, so I think > it makes sense for us to keep the number of "cared about" > configurations as close to N as possible. But, as I said above, those configurations evolve over time. -David -- π L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ π π’ Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ π 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)
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
