Speeding up CI builds? (Re: ESC meeting minutes: 2020-01-23)

[Thorsten Behrens]

Hey Luboš,

Luboš Luňák wrote:
>  So what is the actual need there, if any? Not just Mac, but CI
> builds in general.
>
Discussion was prompted by the news item that Firefox CI went for
cross-building on Mac. And since we were facing similar scalability
issues (that are solved at this time), the ESC thought about if (and
how) that could be an option for us.

> For example, there should be another way to speed Mac builds by
> cross-compiling, namely using icecream to handle that. Icecream has
> a very simple-to-use support for cross-compiling, it'd require only
> setting up Linux build node(s) and Mac would still run the build
> itself, so there'd be no need to alter the build system besides
> setting CC/CXX.
>
That's an absolute brilliant idea, as it also transparently solves the
(non-tiny) catch that for running _tests_, Firefox was still relying
on physical Mac hardware (though of course fewer of them needed).

Would that work more or less out of the box?

Cheers,

-- Thorsten