[webkit-dev] Build slave for JSCOnly Linux MIPS

[Geoffrey Garen]

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 2:08 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at igalia.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 2016-04-18 at 22:36 +0300, Konstantin Tokarev wrote:
>> Are there any objections for lowering GCC requirement from 4.9.0 to
>> 4.8.4 (only for JavaScriptCore without B3)? I'm going to fix arising
>> compilation errors myself.
> 
> I've been kinda hoping to do this regardless, since you started
> contributing GCC 4.8 buildfixes. GCC 4.8 is still being used by a
> prominent distributor that's recently started releasing occasional
> WebKit updates. I worked on downstream patches to remove the GCC 4.9
> requirement so that their users can get WebKit updates. Since
> increasing our GCC requirement past the GCC version included in a
> distribution just guarantees users will never receive WebKit security
> updates, we need to recognize that we moved too quickly in increasing
> our requirement to GCC 4.9. (At the time I thought this was OK, but I
> was wrong.) We'll need to be more careful in the future when bumping
> our GCC requirement, lest we leave a large segment of users stuck on
> ancient versions of WebKit.

GCC 4.8 is three years old.

I don’t think we should put a three year hold on all current and future C++ language features.

Vendors that want to ship security updates to old, stable OS’s should maintain a branch that cherry-picks fixes from trunk and applies build fixes as necessary, rather than holding back development in trunk.

> It's unfortunate as of course we want to be able to use new language
> features, but we need to balance this with the desire to ensure our
> updates reach users.

I don’t think that shipping trunk as a security update on very old platforms is a viable strategy.

Geoff