Jonas Sicking schrieb:
Would it be possible to create a thunderbird build system which simply
takes the output of a firefox build and grabs the files that it needs,
and builds the additions that thunderbird needs.
Generally speaking, libraries don't worry about having a build system
which enables building all downstream products. It's the
responsibility of downstream products to trigger the build system of
libraries.
Yes, but our platform is not built in a way to really be able to act as
an outside library to Thunderbird (or SeaMonkey). The idea to get it
there was around years ago, under different names (the last of them
being XULRunner) and it failed. So what we have is "you need to build
all the platform code if you want to build Thunderbird, and you need to
compile your Thunderbird-specific code into libxul even". And I think
that's the reason where this view you bring up there doesn't apply to
what we have.
Maybe, some years down the road, when Firefox and Thunderbird UI are all
standard HTML, this will be all different, but until then, lives are
much easier when all this lives into a common repository.
The goal of putting seamonkey and thunderbird in separate trees has
always been to make firefox development easier, not harder. That
should include the build system.
That was the idea, yes. In reality, we have found out that this made it
harder, especially for the build system, and we are continuing to waste
a lot of developer time because making sure that the build system at
least stays usable to Thunderbird (and SeaMonkey) is slowing efforts
down to make our build system modern and give it all kinds of
optimizations like caching, dependency-awareness and whatnot that will
improve development speed for all platform and Firefox developers.
As the on-paper-owner of the comm-central build system, I would heavily
appreciate this merge (and killing off "my" module and the repository I
created way back).
KaiRo
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