mozillaZine

Classic Mac OS Build Likely to be Retired and Removed from Tree

by ASA DOTZLER | We know that there are people who would love to see the Mac Classic builds continue but unless a credible maintainer steps up in the next week, mozilla.org plans to retire the Mac Classic (CFM) build and focus resources on a single Mach-O build for OS X.

With swiftly increasing OS X download numbers and dwindling download numbers for Mac Classic, we had planned on moving the Mac Classic build to port status to be maintained by a contributor as are BeOS, OS/2, Solaris and the other ports. That volunteer didn't materialize. If this older Mac build does not have a credible maintainer by Jan 15, rather than moving it to ports status we'll be retiring the CFM build completely and removing it from CVS. This means that there will be no more builds from mozilla.org for Mac OS 8 and 9.

Without a maintainer, Mozilla 1.2.1 and Mozilla 1.0.2 will be the final releases for pre-OS X Macintosh operating systems. We would tag the tree with a "last known working build" tag before removing the CFM build from the tree. Then, should a maintainer materialize at some point in the future this tag might assist in reviving the Mac classic build

We're also moving from the CFM OS X nightly and release builds to the Mach-O OS X builds. We hope to complete this transition in time for the 1.3 release. There are many advantages to moving to Mach-O. Some of those advantages are:
  1. The Mach-0 build is 15-20% faster on our pageload performance tests.
  2. Using the static build, the footprint is about 8MB smaller than CFM mozilla.
  3. The CFM build system is difficult for most non-Mac Mozilla developers. After the hurdle of installing Fink, building with Mach-0 is as easy as building on Linux.
Instructions on building Mach-O can be found at <http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/Mach.html>

--Asa

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