On Mon, Nov 23, 2015, at 12:14 PM, Julien Wajsberg wrote:
> My only bit against this is that when we use xpcshell we help
improving our product.
I don't think we're really helping improve the product. We're using
xpcshell in an unsupported fashion. Unless Mozilla plans to ship an
officially supported SpiderMonkey-based build tool (and I don't think we
should at the current time), we should abandon this.
It can be tempting to use xpcshell in cases where we want the realistic
Gecko experience (all the same APIs, the same JS engine), but the
arguments for this have eroded as the web platform has advanced and as
the Firefox OS-specific hacks we need have been reduced.
Speaking as someone who has historically abused xpcshell and firefox/b2g-
desktop in xulrunner mode for testing purposes, I've definitely come
around to the idea that if we really need gecko being gecko, then we
should accomplish it by using Marionette JS driven from node. There are
non-trivial overhead costs to doing this, but our Marionette JS use-case
is a supported one that has to work. And overhead costs can be
mitigated by using real build tools that are able to run things in
parallel, only rebuild dependencies when required, etc.
>
Also the longer term goal has always bean to be able to run the
build system inside Firefox (eg WebIDE). That said, WebIDE is simply
running a shell command these days.
Shelling out to a subprocess seems like it is indeed the right answer.
Andrew
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