Internationalization API enabled in standalone builds now, clobber times will increase a bit

[Jeff Walden]

With bug 866305 landed, the shell build by default now includes the Intl object, and the existing toLocale*String methods all use Intl functionality to work. Yay!

But this also means that building now requires building ICU as well. Not so yay. That adds several minutes to compile time (for me, with a -j8 build and some inadvertent ccaching I forgot to turn off), a several-x increase in overall compile time.

You should be able to disable the Intl API using --disable-intl-api, to avoid this compile-time hit. If you're not touching Intl code, you might often be able to get away with this. In the longer run, however, this probably isn't sustainable -- particularly as new tests of Intl stuff get landed, and as fuzzers start fuzzing it. But eh, as long as you don't push bustage, feel free to disable if you want. :-)

Note that there's some thought to removing this frob, so that Intl code is just always there and won't bitrot. I'm not entirely certain what the thought is on when, exactly, we should do that. Maybe after it's shipped in a release and we're confident in its being enabled for good. So in the long run, disabling Intl for faster clobbers isn't going to cut it. I recommend using ccache with a generous cache size (see |ccache -s| and |ccache -m| to view and change cache size) to ameliorate this concern.

Jeff

[David Anderson]

Would it make sense to have the option of using system/external icu if
available, similar to nspr? It doesn't make sense to rebuild icu all the
time if it's not going to change.

-David

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[Jeff Walden]

On 04/30/2013 02:12 PM, David Anderson wrote:
> Would it make sense to have the option of using system/external icu if
> available, similar to nspr? It doesn't make sense to rebuild icu all the
> time if it's not going to change.

Certainly. I expect, once we enable this in desktop Firefox, some Linux distro is going to be particularly interested in doing this. :-) They're certainly more competent to do that than we are/I am, to be sure. There *may* be an issue from some non-stable API we're using (ICU really should expose a stable API for the matter, but they don't yet), but hopefully not.

Jeff