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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