gyp VS. gyp-next VS. gn for building NSS/NSPR

[George Lee]

Hello,

Is it currently preferred to use gyp, gyp-next, or gn to build NSS/NSPR? Or maybe it doesn't matter much?

Thanks,

George

[Miklos Vajna]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 05, 2022 at 10:41:07AM -0700, George Lee <george...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it currently preferred to use gyp, gyp-next, or gn to build NSS/NSPR? Or
> maybe it doesn't matter much?

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/security/nss/build.html is a bit
confusing regarding this:

"Please, note that we gyp is currently unmaintained and that our support
for gyp-next is experimental and might be unstable."

In practice I tried gyp on Linux and gyp-next on macOS, and both seem to
work fine, when building 3.77.

Regards,

Miklos

[Benjamin Beurdouche]

Hi,

> On 6 Apr 2022, at 08:17, Miklos Vajna <vmi...@vmiklos.hu> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Apr 05, 2022 at 10:41:07AM -0700, George Lee <george...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is it currently preferred to use gyp, gyp-next, or gn to build NSS/NSPR? Or
>> maybe it doesn't matter much?

It doesn’t matter much at the moment. I haven’t tested gn but I would be surprised if it worked.

> https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/security/nss/build.html is a bit
> confusing regarding this:
>
> "Please, note that we gyp is currently unmaintained and that our support
> for gyp-next is experimental and might be unstable."
>
> In practice I tried gyp on Linux and gyp-next on macOS, and both seem to
> work fine, when building 3.77.

What is meant there is that:
1. NSS currently uses “gyp” to build
2. “gyp” is not maintained by Google anymore
3. “gyp-next” should work for NSS but if Node break backwards compat we might not see the build fail because we still use “gyp” in our CI.

That move to “gyp-next” will likely happen this year, but this is not a priority for us.

Best,
Benjamin

[George Lee]

Thank you Miklos and Benjamin.

Regards,

George