She sure was a good binary format. Farewell, PPC... and we thank you.
In the interest of reclaiming cycles to do more builds, I'd like to stop building nightly PPC builds for the 1.8 branch and trunk for Firefox, and possibly Thunderbird, but I have to talk to mscott first.
We've been doing both Universal builds and PPC builds for awhile now, and I'm pretty sure that everyone is wanting Universal builds over PPC builds.
Please feel free to hollar at me if this is not the case.
Comments
I think the only real advantage of PPC over Universal Binaries can be file size, but I don't think that's worth keeping PPC builds around.
Posted by: Robert Accettura | June 22, 2006 2:27 AM
A couple of reasons i would love PPC builds kept alive:
The majority of Mac users are on PPC machines and will be for some time. Many of us in the world are also still on dialup.
The best thing about the auto-update system was the dropping of complaints about the size of the downloads. With Universal builds that just doubled (FF 1.x Mac users were pretty angry that their Firefox download was several MB larger than their Windows brethren).
Download time of a product makes a big difference. Am i going to test an 8MB nightly that takes me a mere 30 minutes to download? Probably. Am i going to wait a full hour while my line is saturated to get a 16MB nightly to test? Probably not.
To make life even worse for you, i'd love it if there were no universal builds at all, merely PPC and Intel builds. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, i'm sure it does, but how many people run both architectures?
I think this subject is worth some debate in the Moz org.
Posted by: gary | June 22, 2006 2:36 AM
Turn them off!
Posted by: Mark Mentovai | June 22, 2006 3:31 AM
Well, the filesize of the universal binary isn't that large, so the download time is still goog.
As for the file size on the HD, there is a little utility called "TrimTheFat" that can strip the un-needed part (either ppc or intel) from a universal binary:
http://homepage.mac.com/gweston/download.html
Posted by: Xslf | June 22, 2006 9:31 AM
As someone who downloads a nightly build almost daily, and keeps an archive of nightly builds, having to download and keep universal binaries would be somewhat annoying.
However, I realize that I probably represent a very small demographic in this regard.
Posted by: Uri | June 22, 2006 7:13 PM
Far be it from me to argue with mento, but there is one advantage for developers, too: PPC-only tinderboxen are able to cycle a lot more quickly than Universal ones.
The Fx Mac tinderboxen apparently take quite some time to cycle already; a couple of weeks ago Vlad or Stuart had to resort to checking the Camino tinderboxen to see it a fix made the tree go green because they would be waiting for quite some time for the Fx tinderboxen (PPC *or* Uni) to finish.
That said, if you were able to recycle the PPC-building boxen to build whatever is sharing time with the Uni build boxen so that the Uni builds can cycle without waiting for another product, then it's probably a win there.
Posted by: Smokey Ardisson | June 24, 2006 4:40 AM