> This means some people on older hardware or OSes aren't able build Firefox,
This currently means that about 50% of the current users are not being able to
build in the future. With Win 7 and 8.1 market share together we are not
speaking about Vista here. I am building in a vm anyway so can set up a Win 10
one too but limiting choices to force using an operating system which treats
its users like dirt is not what I would call a good move. So as long as the
compilers are supported on other OS than 10 I strongly disagree with this.
FRG
Mike Hoye wrote:
On 2017-07-22 3:13 AM, Frank-Rainer Grahl wrote:
Personally I find this a bad idea. Windows 7 and 8.1 are still supported
till 2020 and 2023. As long as the compilers are supported too on them these
should also be fully supported as a build environment.
Unfortunately we have to build _for_ a number of our supported operating
systems without being able to build _on_ those operating systems. That's been
true for some time now; while we still support 32-bit systems, for example,
you can't build Firefox on 32-bit systems at all due to memory constraints,
and the new MozillaBuild system is 64-bit only due to a variety of dependencies.
This means some people on older hardware or OSes aren't able build Firefox,
that's true, but it doesn't mean they have no way to contribute to Firefox,
and restricting ourselves to only shipping a product that we can build
directly on those older systems means giving every single person who relies on
those systems a crap experience and a substandard product.
It'd be nice in some abstract sense to be able to bootstrap a Firefox
executable on every system we support, but the tradeoffs we'd need to accept
to do that (support costs, development velocity, actual as-delivered product
quality and a lot more) are _so_ egregiously bad for everyone involved that
there's no reasonable, much less responsible, way we can invest any time or
effort making that happen.
- mhoye
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