Changes coming for Mozilla Mac builds
Steve Dagley
There's going to be some major changes within the next couple of weeks for the
Mac builds...
The Mac Classic build (for Mac OS 8.5 thru 9.2.2) will be downgraded from a
primary (tier1 in the old Netscape vernacular) build to 'port' status. While
Netscape employeed engineers will no longer be working on pre-OS X bugs we have
heard from an external developer that wants to keep this build going (which is
why it's being moved to ports rather than simple retirement). More details will
follow before the move happens.
Coinciding with the Classic move to port status, the Mozilla Mac OS X builds
will switch from CFM to Mach-O based builds. This change provides a better than
20% performance increase in pageload tests over the current CFM build and moves
us to the autoconf/make based build system already in use for Win32 and *nix
builds. For those that wonder why we didn't do this before, it boils down to we
could not support two seperate Mac build systems. We stuck with CFM because it
let us do builds for both Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X while Chimera became the
testbed for Mach-O changes. Now that our major Mac customers (read that as the
ones that pay the bills) are no longer releasing Mac Classic applications we can
finally make the switch that so many of us have been waiting for. :-)
For those of you that haven't yet tried the Mach-O builds see
<http://mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/Mach.html>. If you don't know what CFM and
Mach-O are, search <http://developer.apple.com/> for Apple's docs on them.
Steve
--
Steve Dagley
Member of the Technical Staff, Netscape Communications
Macintosh Perfusionist
(All opinions expressed are my own yada yada yada...)
Joe Francis
<sda...@netscape.com> wrote:
> Coinciding with the Classic move to port status, the Mozilla Mac OS X
> builds will switch from CFM to Mach-O based builds.
[...]
> Now that our major Mac customers (read that as the ones that pay the
> bills) are no longer releasing Mac Classic applications we can
> finally make the switch that so many of us have been waiting for. :-)
How do I debug this build? How do I find all declarations or
definitions of a function? How do I do all the things that CodeWarrior
was so good at, and that make me more productive?
> For those of you that haven't yet tried the Mach-O builds see
> <http://mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/Mach.html>.
If you have answers to my questions, you might also want to put
them at the link above.
Steve Dagley
> How do I debug this build?
That, unfortunately, would be gdb.
> How do I find all declarations or definitions of a function?
lxr.mozilla.org will become your favorite web site :-)
> How do I do all the things that CodeWarrior
> was so good at, and that make me more productive?
Believe me, as someone that's been coddled by IDEs on the Mac for >14 years, I'm
not thrilled with giving that up but the advantages of changing the build system
outweigh the downsides. In the short term we suffer the same build system
limitations of the *nix and Win32 platforms. In the long term, pray MetroWerks
releases a version of the CodeWarrior IDE that lives on top of make files.
>>For those of you that haven't yet tried the Mach-O builds see
>><http://mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/Mach.html>.
>
> If you have answers to my questions, you might also want to put
> them at the link above.
Good idea. I've asked Simon if he knows of any good docs for getting started
debugging w/gdb and he sez he can write something up. In the meantime, Apple
has these docs posted:
<http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/DeveloperTools/gdb/gdb/gdb_toc.html>
Jon Monroe
> ... In the long term, pray MetroWerks
Have you thought about using the command line versions of the
CodeWarrior 8.2 compiler and linker (driven from the Unix makefiles /
perl scripts)? That would theoretically make a build that could be
debugged by the CW IDE. You would then get the best of both worlds -
a make-driven build process and a nice debugger.
Also, if you made Mach-O / CFM a build option, you could also support
both build types with a single process (I personally would like the
CFM build to stay around a little longer).
Jon
Jon Monroe
Breakthrough Technologies, LLC
www.breaktech.com
Christopher Seawood
> Steve Dagley <sda...@netscape.com> wrote in message
>
>>... In the long term, pray MetroWerks
>>releases a version of the CodeWarrior IDE that lives on top of make files.
>
>
> Have you thought about using the command line versions of the
> CodeWarrior 8.2 compiler and linker (driven from the Unix makefiles /
> perl scripts)? That would theoretically make a build that could be
> debugged by the CW IDE. You would then get the best of both worlds -
> a make-driven build process and a nice debugger.
See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119589 .
> Also, if you made Mach-O / CFM a build option, you could also support
> both build types with a single process (I personally would like the
> CFM build to stay around a little longer).
Except that it doesn't solve the QA resource issue. QA doesn't have the
resources to handle multiple Mac ports so the non-default option would
be unsupported/untested.
- cls
bburton
> (Resend as the mozilla.org news server apparently at the original post)
>
> There's going to be some major changes within the next couple of weeks for
> the
> Mac builds...
>
> The Mac Classic build (for Mac OS 8.5 thru 9.2.2) will be downgraded from a
> primary (tier1 in the old Netscape vernacular) build to 'port' status. While
> Netscape employeed engineers will no longer be working on pre-OS X bugs we
> have
> heard from an external developer that wants to keep this build going (which
> is
> why it's being moved to ports rather than simple retirement). More details
> will
> follow before the move happens.
>
Thanks for not retiring the classic build. Now if I could only get MY
customers to switch to OS X only!
Brian Burton
BroadJump
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----