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:
- 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 - Create a directory where you would like your source code to go. Note that path name cannot contain spaces.
- 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. - 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.
- 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 - Build it with the command:
make -f client.mk build - wait for about an hour (hoping it will be less on my desktop).
- 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.
Will said,
September 19, 2007 at 6:46 am
Congratulations on your successful build. It’s kind of a beast at first.
Ben said,
September 19, 2007 at 11:36 am
Good job!
Lukas Blakk said,
September 19, 2007 at 3:43 pm
yes, congrats. and also you’re not the only one who opened the new build with a ff2 running in the background – there should be a note about that somewhere.
Dave Humphrey said,
September 19, 2007 at 4:06 pm
You should use -no-remote when you run your minefield build, which lets you have multiple instances going at the same time. I’d do it like this:
$ cd objdir/dist/bin
$ firefox.exe -no-remote -profilemanager
You want the last one so you can make a new profile and not corrupt your old one.
Peter » Blog Archive » Minefield For Dummies said,
January 25, 2008 at 10:35 pm
[...] , if I use Visual Studio 2005 on my machine (I think). Use start-msvc71.bat if you use VS 2003 as Cathy said. This will bring up a sort of bash shell window that accepts unix commands. We’ll be working [...]