1414415 - (without-gradle) [meta] Remove --without-gradle and require Gradle to build Fennec

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: Android Studio and Gradle Integration, enhancement)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Now that Bug 1405376 has landed, we can talk about removing the old moz.build functionality.  This is a classic trade-off:

- keeping --without-gradle allows us to roll back to a known good configuration
- dropping --without-gradle allows us to actually use the Gradle-specific features that we've wanted for a long time.

In particular, we probably can't ever support HLS --without-gradle, so our ability to ship new features --without-gradle is immediately limited.

Comment 1

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

I've made this a meta ticket, since there's lots of little bits of work and clean up needed to actually remove the old moz.build functionality.  Lots of clean up and culling to be done here!

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

--with-gradle has landed on mozilla-central for 58, and if I understand correctly, that means it's on mozilla-beta already (or will be very shortly).  That means it's only 6-7 weeks from mozilla-release.  It would be nice to rip out --without-gradle during the 59 cycle -- in particular, while I still have most of this code swapped into my head -- but I can understand that our release management team will have a much stronger interest in maintaining stability.

So, let's start the discussion with relman.  Gerry Chang, I see from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_owners that you are the release driver for 58.

Nicole, Gerry: can you help me collect the people who get to say how long we need to be able to revert these (large) changes to the build system?

Comment 3

[Gerry Chang [:gchang]]

Hi Johan,
Not sure if you are the right person to ask from Releng's point of view or you can help forward the question to others. Will this have impact on you?

Hi Nevin,
Do you have other thoughts?

Comment 4

[Johan Lorenzo [:jlorenzo]]

Sorry for the delay. I know Aki has been aware of the Gradle changes (which included something related to single-locales APK). There is also some changes in the releases (as in beta and releases) graphs that are upcoming in beta. I prefer deferring the call to him.

Comment 5

[Aki Sasaki (not active)]

I believe gradle builds in 58 will be ok from releng’s perspective.

Comment 6

[Nevin Chen(Not active on Bugzilla)]

Fennec front-end team really need this since we've reach the method count limit. And other team who wanted to add new methods in Fennec also nned gradle-build. 
And once we move to with-gralde, there's no need/reason for turning back ( since old configuration won't support multidex).

Comment 7

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

Unbelievably, this was finished \o/