Intent to require Node to build Firefox 61 and later

[Nicholas Alexander]

Hello dev-platform,

For the reasons outlined at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tOA2aeyjT93OoMv5tUMhAPOkf4rF_IJIHCAoJlwmDHI/edit?usp=sharing,
we would like to make Node a requirement to build Firefox sometime in the
Firefox 61 development cycle. (Firefox 60 will be an ESR release, so this
provides a complete ESR cycle without requiring Node.)

The requirement will likely be Node v8.9.4, the current LTS release.

I would like feedback -- positive and negative -- from downstream
packagers, users of various operating systems and distributions, and
interested developers about this proposal. There has already been some
discussion on dev-builds:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.builds/L2Tp2uS1PGE/yiy30e1EAgAJ.

Please comment on the Google Doc linked above (everybody with the link
should be able to comment), or reply with comments on
dev-b...@lists.mozilla.org.

Thanks!
Nick

[Xidorn Quan]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018, at 11:23 AM, Nicholas Alexander wrote:
> The requirement will likely be Node v8.9.4, the current LTS release.

MozillaBuild currently provides Node v8.9.0. If you are going to require a version higher than that, probably it'd be better to coordinate with the A-team to release a new version of MozillaBuild as soon as possible.

- Xidorn

[jason.l...@gmail.com]

Thanks Nick!


The Firefox Debugger is currently developed in Github and checked into mozilla-central as a bundle [1].


Adding Node to mozilla build would let us check-in the Debugger's src directory and avoid landing bundles. This will help our workflow as well as release engineering, qa, and internal engineers who want to land patches to the debugger or share functionality.

[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/devtools/client/debugger/new/debugger.js

[dmos...@mozilla.com]

Am Mittwoch, 28. Februar 2018 16:23:43 UTC-8 schrieb Nicholas Alexander:
> For the reasons outlined at
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tOA2aeyjT93OoMv5tUMhAPOkf4rF_IJIHCAoJlwmDHI/edit?usp=sharing,
> we would like to make Node a requirement to build Firefox sometime in the
> Firefox 61 development cycle. (Firefox 60 will be an ESR release, so this
> provides a complete ESR cycle without requiring Node.)
>

From the narrow viewpoint of Activity Stream, this will make things a bunch better for us, as well as other teams we work with. The biggest win here will be that it will avoid us checking in build artifacts, so that changes become smaller and easier to analyze.

From the bigger Mozilla viewpoint, this strikes as a big win, since a huge chunk of the world's JavaScript tooling output is primarily available from the npm ecosystem, and it should allow us to take thoughtful dependencies on things that will make us much more efficient, rather than forcing us to write/maintain so much of our own stuff.

Thanks for writing up such a thorough and thoughtful analysis.

Dan