1100174 - Make AUTOCLOBBER=1 the default

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

AUTOCLOBBER=1 should be the default. Reasons:

- It's annoying to start a build, switch to doing something else, then check back on progress a while later and find that it's been idle because a clobber was needed.

- It seems like only experts would want to not auto-clobber, and they are exactly the people who should be able to specify extra stuff in their mozconfig without difficulty. It's just one more thing for newbies to get wrong.

Any counter-arguments?

Comment 1

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

There was discussion in bug 863091. IIRC there was also a mailing list thread or 2 that sparked changing it.

Nobody is happy with the default either way. I think the best outcome is to eliminate clobbers entirely. We all know how well that is going...

Comment 2

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

(In reply to Nicholas Nethercote [:njn] from comment #0)
> Any counter-arguments?

Autoclobber destructively destroys whatever data you had in the build directory. If you're keeping some data in the build directory and you go clobber that away, you have pure dataloss. In particular, this might hit people who compile multiple open-source projects harder--I tend to routinely pipe some extra compilation debugging information into text files, and unexpectedly losing those would be rather frustrating.

I will note that Thunderbird doesn't actually support CLOBBER (if you change the m-c CLOBBER file, TB will happily build without clobbering), and in the past year or so, I can think of only two or three times that it actually needed to be clobbered to build--which suggests that most of the CLOBBER changes affect comparatively less common build platforms (*cough*Android*cough*).

Comment 3

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

(In reply to Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer] from comment #2)

+1

Comment 5

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

The last comment in bug 863091 is one year ago. Why can it be a duplicate?

Comment 6

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

We've already had a lengthy discussion about whether to auto clobber by default or not. Nothing has changed since we last had the conversation. The previous decision stands.

Comment 7

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

Bug 863091 is making AUTOCLOBBER=1 opt-in and this bug suggested making it opt-out. I'm fine with the decision, but this bug can't be a dupe.