Build System Project - Latest Update

[David Burns]

Below is a highlight of all work the build peers have done in the last few
weeks as part of their work to modernise the build infrastructure.

Since the last report[1] a large number of improvements have landed in
Mozilla Central.

The build peers have managed to get numerous patches landed for the tup
backend. This is our first steps to modernising the build. We have landed
patches for FINAL_TARGET_PP_FILES (1305157
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1305157>), to produce
BUILDSTATUS messages (1306405
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1306405>), XPIDL generation:
1293448 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1293448>,
GENERATED_FILES: 1304129
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304129> , and WebIDL
generation: 1304125 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304125> .

The build peers have also helped out on a few optimizations to TaskCluster
with the most notable moving builders to use SSD on Amazon (Bug 1306167)
which halved the time that PGO builds take.

We have done some more work on artifact builds. There is now the option to
download symbols during an artifact build. This benefits both local
developers and what is happening in Automation (bug 1305502
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1305502>).

The build peers have started looking into the build-backend slowness (bug
1259789 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259789>). This is
one of the slowest parts of the configure step in builds, especially on
Windows.

Finally, the build peers have landed, or in the process of landing, build
rewrites for 3rd party libraries we use. More details are available in the
bugs for NSS Bug 1237872
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1237872>, bug 1295937
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1295937> and for Libffi (bug
1262155 <https://bug98304.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1262155>).

David

[1]
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/BWuB6S7qxUc/9HzVRXg3CAAJ