Fate of Mac Classic
Asa Dotzler
builds continue but unless a credible maintainer steps up in the next
week, mozilla.org plans to retire the Mac Classic (CFM) build and focus
resources on a single Mach-O build for OS X.
With swiftly increasing OS X download numbers and dwindling download
numbers for Mac Classic, we had planned on moving the Mac Classic build
to port status to be maintained by a contributor as are BeOS, OS/2,
Solaris and the other ports. That volunteer didn't materialize. If this
older Mac build does not have a credible maintainer by Jan 15, rather
than moving it to ports status we'll be retiring the CFM build
completely and removing it from CVS. This means that there will be no
more builds from mozilla.org for Mac OS 8 and 9.
Without a maintainer, Mozilla 1.2.1 and Mozilla 1.0.2 will be the final
releases for pre-OS X Macintosh operating systems. We would tag the tree
with a "last known working build" tag before removing the CFM build from
the tree. Then, should a maintainer materialize at some point in the
future this tag might assist in reviving the Mac classic build
We're also moving from the CFM OS X nightly and release builds to the
Mach-O OS X builds. We hope to complete this transition in time for the
1.3 release. There are many advantages to moving to Mach-O. Some of
those advantages are:
1. The Mach-0 build is 15-20% faster on our pageload performance tests.
2. Using the static build, the footprint is about 8MB smaller than CFM
mozilla.
3. The CFM build system is difficult for most non-Mac Mozilla
developers. After the hurdle of installing fink, building with Mach-0 is
as easy as building on Linux.
Instructions on building Mach-O can be found at
<http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/Mach.html>
--Asa
Mike Richardson
This news sucks. Mozilla on OS X is almost doomed now because of Safari
so you're going to go the extra mile and totally kill the Classic builds
of Mozilla? So Mozilla just basically vanishes off of Mac completely?
Nobody cares if Mach O is faster and smaller on OS X, Apple just
released the Safari Beta and it's only 3MB, in size it beats the crap
out of every single other browser than iCab, in speed it also beats
Mozilla and Netscape 7 (but maybe not Chimera in my personal tests).
It seems like these decisions are only based upon what the big rich
funding says and not what the people care about. Anyone else who cares
about this sign the petition at
http://www.petitiononline.com/MozOS9/petition.html or voluenteer to be a maintainer.
What about Phoenix for OS 9? Will these changes ruin any possibility of
Phoenix on OS 9?
Christian Biesinger
> It seems like these decisions are only based upon what the big rich
> funding says and not what the people care about.
Get a volunteer maintainer, and things will be fine.
See, it is basically the same as OS/2 and BeOS and Xlib and ...
The, as you put it, "big rich funding" does not care about them either,
still they work just fine; because they have maintainers caring about
these platforms and working on them.
Without a maintainer, it is in no way relevant how many signatures you
get...
> What about Phoenix for OS 9? Will these changes ruin any possibility of
> Phoenix on OS 9?
well, phoenix requires Mozilla. So, yes.
This posting reflects my personal opinion and is not in any way official
for mozilla.org.
--
Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus.
Grey Hodge / jesus X
> This news sucks. Mozilla on OS X is almost doomed now because of Safari
> so you're going to go the extra mile and totally kill the Classic builds
> of Mozilla? So Mozilla just basically vanishes off of Mac completely?
While I'm not a Mac user, at all, even I can see that Mozilla on MacOS X is not
even in the same universe as "doomed". The shift of Mac users from Mozilla on OS
Classic to Mozilla on OS X has been quite decisive. Chimera wasn't started
because everyone was sticking to OS9, and Safari is not a replacement for
Mozilla. They have different goals, and use different means to achieve them.
As for your efforts to find some maintainers, I wish you the best of luck, but
in the end, that platform truly is doomed. The Windows world made such a shift 8
years ago when moving from Windows 3.x to the Win32 platforms of Win95, WinNT,
and their progeny. Progress requires some pain sometimes.
--
jesus X [ Booze-fueled paragon of pointless cruelty and wanton sadism. ]
email [ jesus_x @ mozillanews.org ]
web [ http://www.mozillanews.org ]
query [ And which parallel universe did you crawl out of? ]
warning [ Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script. ]
Torben
> Mike Richardson wrote:
> > It seems like these decisions are only based upon what the big rich
> > funding says and not what the people care about.
>
> Get a volunteer maintainer, and things will be fine.
> See, it is basically the same as OS/2 and BeOS and Xlib and ...
> The, as you put it, "big rich funding" does not care about them either,
> still they work just fine; because they have maintainers caring about
> these platforms and working on them.
>
> Without a maintainer, it is in no way relevant how many signatures you
> get...
Is there some page that describe what the duties of such a maintainer
is?
daa
well...
in this case the maintainer would have to do what ever is needed to keep
the mac classic build system in sync with the tree ( Mac classic uses
compiler specific build project files that are NOT used by the gcc based
OSX build) and fix any other issues that come up
michael lefevre
I can't see one for mozilla specifically, but a google search for "port
maintainer" finds explanations from other projects...
basically, the maintainer needs to get the mozilla source code from CVS
and build it under Mac Classic, and as and when someone does something to
the mozilla code which breaks the Mac Classic port, the maintainer has to
fix the code to make it work again. the building and fixing needs to be
done on a very regular basis, because if a little time passes, it becomes
much harder to work out exactly which change broke it.
so it's not a trivial task...
--
michael
Gervase Markham
Indeed. Given the amount of time I see people spending updating Mac
project files, if one person had to do _all_ that work, I'd guesstimate
it would take at least 2 days a week of someone's time to keep up. And
any code changes required to make Mac build would have to be reviewed
and super-reviewed in the normal way.
Not trivial indeed.
Gerv
Gervase Markham
> about this sign the petition at
> http://www.petitiononline.com/MozOS9/petition.html or voluenteer to be a maintainer.
Only one of these two options will actually make any difference at all.
Guess which one.
Gerv
Torben
> In article <1fomhp7.1bpe0s9soevp6N%tor...@despammed.com>, Torben wrote:
> > Christian Biesinger <cbies...@web.de> wrote:
> >> Get a volunteer maintainer, and things will be fine.
> > Is there some page that describe what the duties of such a maintainer
> > is?
>
> I can't see one for mozilla specifically, but a google search for "port
> maintainer" finds explanations from other projects...
>
> basically, the maintainer needs to get the mozilla source code from CVS
> and build it under Mac Classic, and as and when someone does something to
> the mozilla code which breaks the Mac Classic port, the maintainer has to
> fix the code to make it work again. the building and fixing needs to be
> done on a very regular basis, because if a little time passes, it becomes
> much harder to work out exactly which change broke it.
That pretty much what I guessed.
> so it's not a trivial task...
I also think it will be hard to find someone who is capable of doing
this which has not switched to OS X and therefore does not care :-(
Christian Biesinger
>If this
> older Mac build does not have a credible maintainer by Jan 15, rather
> than moving it to ports status we'll be retiring the CFM build
> completely and removing it from CVS.
Hi Asa,
in response to that posting, jan 15 is over now, when will CFM be
officially retired?
/me doesn't like two build systems that need to be modified for patches