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For quite a while now, Firefox has been doing nightly builds of
64-bit Linux. These are treated as unofficial, but happen for both
the 3.5 & 3.6 branches. Recently, they have also been spinning
up unit test builds on trunk, although they haven't yet shipped a
64-bit build as part of an alpha. Note that Linux distributions
already tend to ship 64-bit versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.<br>
<br>
gozer has been working on a 64-bit Linux build platform [1]. It is
at the stage where we have only a couple more issues to resolve, and
then it should be ready for deployment in production. The check
& xpcshell-tests all pass, the mozmill tests have approximately
the same failures as the 32-bit version (so we won't be enabling
them yet).<br>
<br>
As some of our branches are quite old, I'm proposing that we do the
following:<br>
<ul>
<li>Thunderbird 3.0: Unit test only</li>
<ul>
<li>Thunderbird 3.0 will soon be the not-latest-major version
branch. I don't think there is any point in doing nightly
builds for 3.0 as I don't think it will actually buy us
anything - at most a few more nightly testers.<br>
</li>
<li>However, having the unit test builds will give us some
knowledge that we aren't breaking 64-bit builds which Linux
distros produce.</li>
</ul>
<li>Thunderbird 3.1: Unit test and .....?</li>
<ul>
<li>I'm on the fence here as to what to include. We're just
about to release (well hopefully in a few weeks) I'm not sure
if we also want to start producing nightly builds, however
like for the Thunderbird 3.0 branch, I think we definitely
want a unit test builder.<br>
</li>
</ul>
<li>Trunk: Depends, Nightly, Unit Test and Debug/Bloat builds</li>
<ul>
<li>i.e. the full set of tests and builds.</li>
<li>We still would not release the 64-bit builds, unless Firefox
started doing so as well - in general I don't think we should
release versions built on core where Firefox isn't doing the
same.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
Thoughts welcome<br>
Mark.<br>
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