Cathy's Weblog

I have successfully built mozilla on my laptop running Windows. Note, my laptop is running vs 2003 and not the recommended vs 2005. I have that on desktop and will be doing the build before I go to bed tonight.

Anyhow, I figured I would take this time to document the steps I took to do it:

1. Download the build tools. For windows:
   http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Windows_Build_Prerequisites. Because I’m using vs 2003 on laptop, I ran start-msvc71.bat
2. Create a directory where you would like your source code to go. Note that path name cannot contain spaces.
3. use cvs to checkout the source code. The quick start guide at:
   http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla_Source_Code_%28CVS%29#CVS_Client_Settings
   shows the three commands needed to checkout the source for the browser and put it into a directory called mozilla. NOTE. running all 3 lines will get you the source.
4. after getting the source, go into the top directory of the source and create a folder where you will want your object files to go. This will allow you to clean the build and rebuild more easily. This folder can have any name.
5. Create a .mozconfig file in your top directory. This file specifies the options. The options I specified enabled debugging, disabled optimizing, specified the location of my object files. It was four lines long and contained:. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
   mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objectfiles
   ac_add_options –enable-debug
   ac_add_options –disable-optimize
6. Build it with the command:
   make -f client.mk build
7. wait for about an hour (hoping it will be less on my desktop).
8. test it out. Suppose that you had named the directory where you want the object files to go in step 4 “objectfiles”, your executable will be in objectfiles\dist\bin
   Special note. The first time I tried to test it out, I had firefox already running. So when I went to run the executable that I had just built, I spawned another window of firefox 2. I had to close off firefox 2 first before running it.

Bah, it looks like I goofed up this past weekend. I had not actually built mozilla like I thought I had. I had simply checked out the source. My experience with make was that when you use make, you are using it to create an executable. So I was happily following instructions in the quickstart guide and when I got to the line that said make… well I kind of assumed that I was building the browser. Since it started listing off all the files, I had kind of assumed that it was in fact building each one. As it turns out this is not the case. All I had done was checkout the source files. So as I write my blog now, my lap top is actually building mozilla (and this time I think I have it actually building). Let you all know how it goes later

Over the weekend I decided to try to build mozilla. I went to the web site, got the approproiate tools, downloaded the source (and yes I even used cvs) and did a build. I have been looking at the lectures online about the build system and I sort of have an idea of what its about but I’m still very new to the terms and find some of it confusing. I found this link:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla_Source_Code_%28CVS%29#Quick_Start_Guide

to be useful. So I went there and did what it said.

Try number 1: Got an error because it was defaulting into my documents path on windows and I couldn’t use paths with spaces

Try number 2: moved to a directory without spaces and did it again. My machine chugged a long for about 30 min or so and announced that the build was successful, no errors.

Now… here is where I’m stuck. This will sound really silly so bear with me. I’m not totally sure what it is that I built. I can’t seem to find any kind of executable to test. I know my computer did things for a while. I even did it on two computers. In the end though, I’m not sure what it was that was produced.

I went to the open source course wiki and looked at the lab for this week about building mozilla. There were steps in it that I definitely did not do. Looking forward to today’s class where I hope not only to build mozilla but figure out what to do with it after its built.

Revolution OS is a documentary about the open source and free software movement. I remember trying to read and understand the gnu public license once and found it very hard to understand. I found that the film really helped to explain this.

Too bad that they check how good our passwords are when we change them… can you imagine changing it every 45 days to ENTER

I admit it… I have never blogged before. So this is my first ever blog entry anywhere. My theme for todays blog is therefore “my first blog”.

I have never really liked writing diaries or journals. I’ve had English teachers tell me that I had to document time spent on an essay in a log before because it is not possible to write a good essay in one night. Personally I do not agree. Just because it is not committed to paper doesn’t mean I have not started thinking about what I want to say. I just always thought it kind of silly to log things like “spent 30 min in the tub thinking about symbolism in Alice in Wonderland” or “spent 15 min before falling asleep thinking about Hamlet”. As for diaries, I just never got into the habit of writing one. I prefer to simply recall each day from memory. Although… my memory has always been at least mildly shoddy so I wonder why on earth I would try to rely on it.

So why blog now? I have been told that blogging is fun (by my colleague Chris Tyler). I am not totally sure I see this yet but I’m willing to give it a chance . I am also starting to work on some open source development and I’ve been told that Blogs are an effective way for the open source community to communicate. Therefore, it would be a good idea to maintain a blog about what is happening on my project.

So I do have some questions about blogs that I have always wondered about. With all the blogs out there today, how do people find time to read them? It seems like everyone has a blog somewhere and would this not just cause some major information overload at some point? Hopefully I will figure this out in the near future. In any case this should be an interesting experiencing