1245940 - creating a docker image for building thunderbird

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Build Config, enhancement, P5)

Description

[monperrus]

building TB is hard and requires specific versions of each tool of the build chain.

creating a docker image for building Thunderbird would ease building and may foster new contributions.

Comment 1

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

This is a good idea, I support doing this.

Comment 2

[Ryan Lee Sipes]

Spoke to Rob about this, CC'ing him on the bug. We could create a docker image and then link to it from DTN.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

It's potentially not really worth doing, if you consider how easy ./mach bootstrap is on linux. That will install the needed versions of needed libraries. Dependencies change almost weekly, so what exactly to link people to not to get them stranded on a version that doesn't work (without mach bootstrap again) is quite unclear.

Comment 4

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

I guess what I was picturing when Ryan suggested this to me was to have a variation of the Docker image that gets used by Taskcluster. Have it mount local storage for source checkouts and object dirs rather than trying to create a giant disk image (which is something I ran into when looking at some prior art, see below). If you're an IDE user like me this lets you work with your IDE installed in your OS as running an IDE in a Docker is kind of painful. I might even go so far as to wrap mach somehow so that "mach configure" or whatever runs in the Docker container.

As for that prior art, I ran across https://janitor.technology/, which appears to be loosely tied to Mozilla and they already have a Docker image for building Thunderbird. Their thing is to launch a whole IDE based off Cloud9 on AWS and then you can develop "anywhere". I tried to pull it in and run locally, but I ran out of disk space doing so because their image for Thunderbird apparently has a full source checkout already and I don't have enough space on the filesystem that would house the the image for such a beast.

I still think it might be worth doing, with or without the whole IDE in a browser thing. Over the years one of my frustrations with trying to build any Mozilla project was getting the right libraries and compilers. mach never has worked with my Linux distro of choice. If there were a reliable Docker image ready to go it could get people past that first hurdle.

I'll try to look at Janitor again later in the week. Maybe work with them to get something going that we can point people at.