Chromium development on Windows 7

[Bruce Dawson]

A recent clang-roll (crrev.com/c/2518420, November 4th) caused Chrome to stop building on Windows 7, with a "permission denied" failure on lld-link (tracked in crbug.com/1150302). This wasn't intentional, but it was probably inevitable. It takes extra work to keep Chrome's development tools working on Windows 7, and breakage doesn't tend to be noticed because Google's build machines and developer machines have all been on Windows 10 for a while.

This isn't the first Windows 7 build-breakage this year and it feels like it might be time to call it - the maintenance cost is exceeding the benefits. If somebody feels strongly that building on Windows 7 is important then feel free to investigate the failure and propose a fix (presumably in the llvm repo) - we are generally willing to accept community contributions of this sort.

Absent a community investigation and fix I plan to update the Chromium Windows build instructions to say that Windows 10 is required for building Chromium.

This does not change our support for running Chromium on Windows 7 - that is still supported. This is purely about building chromium on Windows 7. If you need to test on Windows 7 you can build the mini_installer on Windows 10 (or on Linux) and copy it to the Windows 7 machine.

Please reply here with any thoughts.

--

Bruce Dawson

[Bruce Dawson]

I updated the build instructions and one of the early-to-run scripts to document and enforce that Windows 10 is now required. This doesn't change anything (Windows 7 stopped working a few weeks ago) but it formalizes the requirement. The change is crrev.com/c/2570075.

[Chris Hamilton]

FWIW, I think dropping building-on-Windows-7 support makes sense. We've had a very sufficient grace period.

Cheers,

Chris 

--
--
Chromium Developers mailing list: chromi...@chromium.org
View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chromium-dev...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/87e0703f-6370-495c-808b-30a8559aa36bn%40chromium.org.