No new Win32 nightlies since 11/14

Discussion about official Mozilla Firefox builds
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ehume
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No new Win32 nightlies since 11/14

Post by ehume »

I have seen no new Win32 nightlies since 11/14. I'm beginning to feel a little behind the times.

Is there a particular reason for this? Different people who do the Win32 vs Linux? Bug in the Win32 version? Something else?

Ed
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Re: No new Win32 nightlies since 11/14

Post by asa »

ehume wrote:I have seen no new Win32 nightlies since 11/14. I'm beginning to feel a little behind the times.

Is there a particular reason for this? Different people who do the Win32 vs Linux? Bug in the Win32 version? Something else?

Ed


Something probably went wrong with the windows build machine. We still don't have any formal build support. It's just a couple of developers' desktops making builds. Expect frequent outages ;-)

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denro
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Post by denro »

I think the developers will do a better job if they take a break once in awhile. They certainly deserve it for the great work they have given us. It has only been 3 days. They really should take some time off periodically and live the rest of their lives.
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Post by Immacolata »

Notice how the last few days have been "Weekend". I know that's a strange phenomenon for some people :) But a weekend should be spent recouperating after a hard week in the cubicle.
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Stefan
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Post by Stefan »

denro wrote:I think the developers will do a better job if they take a break once in awhile.


The issue here isn't if the devs need a break or not. The issue is that the devs did NOT have a break, but the fruit of their weekend work (15th, 16th, 17th) is only available for Linux.

I personally also held back on upgrading my old 8th version the entire weekend becuse I saw the Win was lagging behind and thinking "it must be just hours away".
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Post by asa »

Stefan wrote:
denro wrote:I think the developers will do a better job if they take a break once in awhile.


The issue here isn't if the devs need a break or not.<snip>

Actually, in a way it is. You could demand that the developer get in his car or on the bus, drive into work on the weekend, troubleshoot the build machine, get a build started, wait to see that it completes and gets delivered to the ftp staging area, get back in his car or on the bus, drives home and goes back to enjoying his weekend. Or you could conclude that it's not worth his effort and he would be better off relaxing and enjoying his weekend with the hope that he comes back in on Monday refreshed and ready to return to being your build slave for the next 5 days.

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Post by Stefan »

asa wrote: You could demand that the developer get in his car or on the bus, drive into work on the weekend, troubleshoot the build machine, get a build started, wait to see that it completes and gets delivered to the ftp staging area, get back in his car or on the bus, drives home and goes back to enjoying his weekend. Or you could conclude that it's not worth his effort and he would be better off relaxing and enjoying his weekend with the hope that he comes back in on Monday refreshed and ready to return to being your build slave for the next 5 days.

--Asa


Opps sorry.
I didn't know someone had to go somewhere to make a build but eg could make a build on his home mashine after finised coding while sitting in the sofa watching sports drinking a well deserved beer :)
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Post by laszlo »

Your daily dose of Win32 Phoenix seems to just have returned...
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ehume
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I was just wondering why . . .

Post by ehume »

As a non-developer, I didn't understand why the linux builds proceeded while the Win32 builds did not. I get the idea from the above posts that making a build for an OS is not quite as easy as dumping it into a compiler.
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Re: I was just wondering why . . .

Post by asa »

ehume wrote:As a non-developer, I didn't understand why the linux builds proceeded while the Win32 builds did not. I get the idea from the above posts that making a build for an OS is not quite as easy as dumping it into a compiler.

There's some scripts on a machine that automatically do a pull of the sourcecode from cvs.mozilla.org, compiles a build, and pushes those compiled bits to an ftp staging area. Each of those steps needs to complete without problems for the build to show up on ftp for you to enjoy. This happens without developer intervention for the most part but sometimes one of the build machines just decides not to work, or it gets accidentally powered down or some other application on the machine conflicts with the pull, build or stage script. Ther are any number of reasons that pull might not finish, like a dropped connection to the CVS server and there are any number of reasons that a compile might not finish, like bad code getting checked into the tree and there are any number of reasons that a build might not make it to ftp like a full disk on the staging server. Most of these possible failures are usually easily fixed but sometimes takes a physical reboot or something like that that on a weekend might not be a high priority.

I'm guessing that few of you were around in the days before mozilla.org started providing daily and milestone builds. I remember the days of random builds popping up at random ftp sites from folks generous enough to publish their compiled builds every once in a while and sites like kerz's mozbin that arose to point to the latest available random build. That you can get any one of about 40 builds a day from mozilla.org is a far better world than only a few short years ago when you had to scour the newsgroups and fansites to find a single binary that might not even work on your platform.

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free [beer|speech] compilers on win32?

Post by djk »

It'd be nice to be able to compile Phoenix (and Moz) with a free compiler on Windows. Ideally gcc (bug 134113), but I guess the free (beer) Borland compiler (bug 62773) would be OK.

That way, many of us testers wouldn't depend on the mozilla.org 'build slaves', as you think we call them.

I find it a little ironic that the most famous project to go from closed to open source still relies on Microsoft to build. Then again, there's probably not much incentive for AOL to devote resources to make Mozilla build with anything other than MSVC; their licences are bought and paid for.
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Post by mesostinky »

"I find it a little ironic that the most famous project to go from closed to open source still relies on Microsoft to build."

Edit

I agree after trying to compile Mozilla.
Last edited by mesostinky on November 26th, 2002, 6:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: free [beer|speech] compilers on win32?

Post by asa »

djk wrote:It'd be nice to be able to compile Phoenix (and Moz) with a free compiler on Windows. Ideally gcc (bug 134113), but I guess the free (beer) Borland compiler (bug 62773) would be OK.

We're accepting patches. Compiling on windows with all that crap, cygwin, activestate perl, an MS compiler, etc. was undesirable for me so I installed Linux (RH8) and my life is a lot easier now. Whereas before I had to spend about 3 hours downloading all the software I needed and getting my hands on a compiler, now I mkdir, set cvsroot, checkout a script and make all in about 30 seconds. Maybe if you don't have the skills or the time to make Moz work with your free windows compilers then you could just move over to Linux where there are an abundance of free compilers that already work with Moz.

djk wrote:"I find it a little ironic that the most famous project to go from closed to open source still relies on Microsoft to build.

I find it a little ironic that people who know how open source software development works still expect someone else to write the code for them.

--Asa
Last edited by asa on November 19th, 2002, 11:25 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Thumper »

mesostinky wrote:Why? The windows builds are for people are already paid for and own Micorsoft Windows. At that point you might as well just use the tool that's best for the platform.


You might not be aware of this, but Windows doesn't actually _come_ with a free MS compiler.

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djk
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Re: free [beer|speech] compilers on win32?

Post by djk »

asa wrote:
djk wrote:It'd be nice to be able to compile Phoenix (and Moz) with a free compiler on Windows. Ideally gcc (bug 134113), but I guess the free (beer) Borland compiler (bug 62773) would be OK.

We're accepting patches.


You keep saying that... :-)
I realize that Mozilla.org will accept patches, hence the fact that those two bugs are not closed.
I'm watching those bugs, hoping that some kind soul with more time and knowledge than I, can make things work.

asa wrote:Compiling on windows with all that crap, cygwin, activestate perl, an MS compiler, etc. was undesirable for me


True, even if I had MSVC, the rest of the setup sounds like a big pain.
I'm really glad someone at mozilla.org has already purchased MSVC and done all that setup on the nightly build machines. I appreciate the work that they do to provide me, a lowly tester, with nightly binary builds that I use.

asa wrote: so I installed Linux (RH8) and my life is a lot easier now. Whereas before I had to spend about 3 hours downloading all the software I needed and getting my hands on a compiler, now I mkdir, set cvsroot, checkout a script and make all in about 30 seconds. Maybe if you don't have the skills or the time to make Moz work with your free windows compilers then you could just move over to Linux where there are an abundance of free compilers that already work with Moz.


Sounds nice. But I think this whole discussion started because a few Windows builds were 'missing' from the FTP site. And then I lamented the fact that Windows users cannot build without MSVC.

asa wrote:
djk wrote:"I find it a little ironic that the most famous project to go from closed to open source still relies on Microsoft to build.

I find it a little ironic that people who know how open source software development works still expect someone else to write the code for them.


Indeed, I do know how open source development works. I've run my own project. I ran out of free time to do anything more with it. I still get emails suggesting additional features and asking about a port to Windows (...yes...TO Windows). So I'm not _expecting_ someone else to write code for me, because I realize that it takes time and resources to do so.

I'm just saying that it'd be nice if a Windows user could have the ability to build Mozilla/Phoenix using Free tools. By making compiling more accessable, there'd be less reliance on the binary nightly builds.
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