[mconnor at mozilla.com: Raising the bar on Linux]

[Alexander Sack]

Here something posted today on those mailing lists below ... nothing
really new, but more official ...

----- Forwarded message from Mike Connor <mconnor at mozilla.com> -----

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Delivery-date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:24:03 +0200
From: Mike Connor <mconnor at mozilla.com>
Subject: Raising the bar on Linux
To: dev-planning at lists.mozilla.org, dev-apps-firefox at lists.mozilla.org,
	dev-apps-thunderbird at lists.mozilla.org,
	dev-platforms-linux at lists.mozilla.org
Reply-To: dev-planning at lists.mozilla.org
List-Id: <dev-platforms-linux.lists.mozilla.org>

Posted previously to my blog/planet, reposting to newsgroups to get  
wider communication, please follow up to dev-planning.

I’ve been having discussions with various Linux distro vendors around  
updating our runtime requirements to newer/more stable versions.  We  
have been building binaries that work across a large range of  
runtimes and with a fairly aggressive backwards compatibility story.   
We were still working with Red Hat 8.2 until sometime after Gecko  
1.8, IIRC.  However, this has resulted in a lot of workarounds and  
ugly hacks to keep going, especially as we start to use pango and  
other newer libraries.

As a result, we’ve looked at how other apps interact with distros,  
and I’ve spoke to Chris Aillon of Red Hat/Fedora, and Alexander Sack  
of Ubuntu for their opinions.  What we’ve come up with, based  
primarily on Chris and Alexander’s input, is a set of fairly current  
runtime requirements that we will commit to supporting for Firefox  
3.  Older distros will be able to have build-time support/workarounds  
as necessary, but Mozilla will not ship or test builds for older  
platforms.  This is still a proposal, but it seems as if everyone is  
very much on the same page, so I am hoping to make this final very  
soon.  Please direct any feedback to  the discussion page on the  
wiki, or to this newsgroup.

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Linux/Runtime_Requirements has the current  
set, which we expect to adopt fairly soon.

-- Mike
_______________________________________________
dev-platforms-linux mailing list
dev-platforms-linux at lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-linux


----- End forwarded message -----

 - Alexander