1562625 - make rust version check strict equality on beta/release/esr

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Nathan Froyd [:froydnj]]

We get all sorts of people filing bugs on "New versions of Rust fail to compile release/ESR", which we're constantly closing as WONTFIX. We should just make configure complain if you try to compile beta/release/ESR with some other version of Rust besides the minimum, and then maybe the bugs will stop.

We should also really fix bootstrap, but I think that's a little dicier so long as we rely on rustup.

Comment 1

[Landry Breuil (:gaston)]

You cant rely on rustup for everything. Some platforms arent supported by rustup, and anyway most *nix packagers have build systems not allowing network access, so it's a no-go.

What if someone tries to package esr-1 (hard-requiring rust-1 and not newer) and esr-next (requiring at least rust-next) on the same platform, not being able to use rustup ? package multiple versions of rust, with all the crazyness that means ?

Sorry, but this hard version requirement policy is a bit too much.

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

As someone that has shown people the link to "esr60 rust" for a while now, I think it's to be expected that esr60 and esr68 won't compile with a single rust toolchain.

Personally, I don't think that updating the rust code on ESR to work with newer versions of rust, potentially requiring a toolchain update within a ESR car, would meet my expectations on the changes on a single ESR car.

That said, we might get away with a max version that's not forced to be the min version. OTH, enforcing the version of rust might be good for reproducible builds on a stable release channel.

Comment 3

[Landry Breuil (:gaston)]

it seems esr60 compiles with rust 1.36, using a 2-lines patch: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D20810#change-K68aYoUXfAu1

I get it that mozilla only cares about its own linux builds, produced by taskcluster/a CI maintained by mozilla to fit its own needs, but i really think the vast majority of linux/unix users get their firefox from their packaging system, and all of them will face this issue until esr60 is phased out for esr68 (which might not happen in some stable branch of packaging systems) - so imo, the issue stands, and i guess distributors will prefer to be pointed at a 2-lines patch instead of a "this is not supported" message.....