Re: ideas for returning memory to the OS

* Boris Zbarsky <[email protected]> wrote:
> Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > Actually, I don't care much about it.
> > BTW: there's cygwin, mingw, etc.
> 
> Already addressed.

Sorry, perhaps missed it. Are there any major problem w/ building
mozilla on cygwin or mingw ? 

> >> It can, yes.  But no shipping distros have a new enough cairo version 
> >> yet, last I checked.  
> > 
> > Ah ? Which version do you require ?
> 
> At the moment, pretty much "tip as of today".

Sorry, can't follow :(

> >> Neither does Windows, nor OS X. 
> > 
> > Can't self-compiling people just be expected update ? 
> 
> We're talking about the users of the software, who are certainly not 
> "self-compiling".

Already addressed it in other postings: it's an distro issue,
and distro-agnostic binpkgs should be treated as their own distro ;-P

> > IMHO, cairo is quite stable. At least I didn't have any major trouble
> > yet (besides the stupid feature-deps ;-o).
> 
> You're not using it very much, I guess? 

Right, you got me ;-o
Maybe you could enlighten me some bit.

> Or not caring about performance, memory footprint, correctness, or memory leaks?

I *do* care, but for an clean modularity (black box model), the key point are 
*interfaces*, not things laying behind them. Of course modules have to be
correct, no question, but this is the issue of the module, not it's users.
Just like with contracts: if you guaranteed some service or sold some product,
it's *you* are responsible for your service/product being correct, not your
customer's.

In our case: 3rd-party libs are products, mozilla just buys them ;-)


Maybe it helps understanding my views if you know I'm coming from the 
embedded world: here each module vendor has to *guarantee* the correctness
of his product, reliabilty is the *absolute* requirement - there is *no*
room for any experiments. Broken products can kill people.
On this paradigm, mozilla (in it's current structure) is unmaintainable.


Well, this really gets OT on this list (as it's dedicated to performance only).
Sorry for highjacking this thread (I couldn't stop myself ;-o). 
At least we've got an interesting discussion here and you folks reply
to my posts - more than I've ever reached on other moz lists :)

I suggest moving this thread to an more appropriate list, eg. 
general - are you all subscribed to this list ?


cu
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