On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Jeff Walden <[email protected]> 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.) > 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. -- Henri Sivonen [email protected] https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
