This is relevant to my interests (less the reproducible builds part, but very much the "well commented CI script" part), and for a frame of reference I have successfully built the last couple of brave tags because I'm persistent that way. But I haven't put it in my CI yet because they appear to clone *the whole chromium* repo courtesy of depot_tools & gclient, making the caching story very bad as that git repo is twenty two gigs (not the checkout, mind you, I mean the git repo)
Plus, the build takes several hours on my Ubuntu machine, so unknown what the CI job timeout is or how beefy the runners need to be in order to not OOM a monster C++ linker
I want to be careful with this commentary, because it's just my opinion as an outsider, and ultimately it's their project. But I struggle mightily with the decision tree that lead one to have a home grown build system written in npm that shells out to depot_tools, gclient, a bunch of manual git clones (although there are some git submodules, too), then a ... fascinating ... manual patching system layered on top of it all. I'm glad it works for them, but it makes wading in by the casual user incredibly hard.
Compare that to mozbuild (and its new "mach" friend) that as very best I can tell is python all the way down and since their CI system is also open source, one can very easily crib enough config files to build it locally
mdaniel|4 years ago
Plus, the build takes several hours on my Ubuntu machine, so unknown what the CI job timeout is or how beefy the runners need to be in order to not OOM a monster C++ linker
I want to be careful with this commentary, because it's just my opinion as an outsider, and ultimately it's their project. But I struggle mightily with the decision tree that lead one to have a home grown build system written in npm that shells out to depot_tools, gclient, a bunch of manual git clones (although there are some git submodules, too), then a ... fascinating ... manual patching system layered on top of it all. I'm glad it works for them, but it makes wading in by the casual user incredibly hard.
Compare that to mozbuild (and its new "mach" friend) that as very best I can tell is python all the way down and since their CI system is also open source, one can very easily crib enough config files to build it locally