Liz Chak Assignment 1

Under construction!!

Build Prerequisites

Hardware Requirements

My copy of Mozilla is built on a system with the following hardware (and it took less than an hour):

• AMD Sempron Processor 3000+
• 1.80 GHz
• 512 MB of RAM
• Windows XP Professional operating system

Tools Requirements

Before I proceed with the Firefox build, the following tools are installed:

Visual Studio.NET 2005

• Obtain a copy of VS.NET 2005 from ACS downloads.
• Download Daemon Tools to extract the iso files.
• Run the installer, it will cleanly install VS.NET 2005.

Cygwin

• Install Cygwin here.

Problems and Solutions

Problem: To build the installer makensis is required in your path

The very first problem I encountered after I started to build took me merely a couple minutes to solve thanks to my great old friend Google. The command prompt spurted out this error message:

checking for makensis... no
configure: error: To build the installer makensis is required in your path. 
To build without the installer reconfigure using --disable-installer.

Solution: To build the installer makensis is required in your path

I found my solution on a forum. Basically I just added "ac_add_options --disable-installer" to my .mozconfig file.

Problem: "target `c' doesn't match the target pattern" error

The next problem I encountered was a little trickier. The error code was:

../coreconf/rules.mk:365: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:406: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:407: warning: overriding commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:366: warning: ignoring old commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:437: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:438: warning: overriding commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:407: warning: ignoring old commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:445: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:446: warning: overriding commands for target `c
../coreconf/rules.mk:438: warning: ignoring old commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:449: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:450: warning: overriding commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:446: warning: ignoring old commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:464: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:465: warning: overriding commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:450: warning: ignoring old commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:468: target `c' doesn't match the target pattern
../coreconf/rules.mk:469: warning: overriding commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:465: warning: ignoring old commands for target `c'
../coreconf/rules.mk:966: *** multiple target patterns.  Stop.

My typical solution to any problems is "consulting" my old friend Google. It seemed like quite a few people encountered the same problem. I found out from a forum that the problem was that I didn't have the right version of Make. I had Make 3.81 which should have been Make 3.80.

I pulled up the GNU Tools for Microsoft Windows (Cygwin) installation guide again, and realized that I have missed out the part where it mentioned make 3.80 (not 3.81!) -- dependency analyzer for software builds (Devel category) as one of the required packages. However, when I reinstalled Cygwin again, it didn't give me an option to choose Make 3.80!! (I think this is a serious issue and should be outlined in the Windows Build Documentation)

I tried various solutions (one of them being: hunted for an older version of Cygwin to install) but my build still failed. After several unsuccessful attempts, I consulted Andrei Hajdukewycz for a solution, and the miracle happened, Firefox was then successfully built!!

Solution to "target `c' doesn't match the target pattern" error

• Install Cywgin from here
• Download Make 3.80
• Extract it and install it
• As it is a binary package, you could just grab the Make executable file (make.exe) and drop it in Cywgin -> bin (this will overwrite the existing Make executable)
• Double check if you have the right Make package by typing this command:

$ make -v
GNU Make 3.80

Voila!

I also learned from Andrei Hajdukewycz that you can dump the Make package in your Cygwin packages temp directory and the installer will let you install it. The mirrors don't seem to have properly set up setup.hint files to point to the old versions of the Make files.

Resources

I wouldn't have successfully built without the following documentations:

• Windows Build Prerequisites
• David Humphrey's Guide to Building Firefox on Win32 using Visual Studio .NET 2005
• Mozillazine

Special thanks to Andrei Hajdukewycz for guiding me through the most difficult part of the build process!!

Conclusion

I have successfully built one of the world's biggest projects and have made a friend!