User:Mdsouza/Assignment 01: Build the Fox

Overview

The way I decided to proceed with this assignment was to read all the information out there about how the build process works before trying anything out. I did this to decrease my chances that I do not fall into a "try, fail, try again" scenario. However, as it came to be, finding a bug is inevitable. :(

In this report below I mentioned the tools one needs, steps I took, and problems that I tackled to get me through the processing of building firefox 1.5.0.7 without using CVS!

Computer Specs

• Intel Pentium IV 1.7 GHz
• 1GB of RAM
• 40GB Hard Drive
• Windows XP Professional

Steps Took To Build the Fox

Did The Boring Stuff

Here are some of the sites I spent the most time reading:

• Windows Build Prerequisites
• Windows Build Documentation
• David Humphrey's Guide to Building Firefox (and the links from there)
• Mozilla Build FAQ
• Getting Make to place nice with Cygwin
• Firefox Build Forum @ MozillaZine
• Other Student's Assignments

Downloaded And Installed The Tools

• Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET 2003® (C++ module is needed mainly). It's available from ACS -- Pre-requesite Disc, Disc 1, Disc 2
• WinRar to extract several archive files
• Cygwin | More Info | Cygwin Main Website

When installing Cygwin the following packages need to be selected:

* ash -- UNIX-like command line interpreter shell (Base category) 
* coreutils -- GNU core utilities (includes fileutils, install, sh-utils, and textutils) (Base category) 
* cvs -- concurrent versions system (Devel category) 
* diffutils -- file comparison utility (Base category) 
* findutils (Base category) 
* gawk -- pattern matching language (Base and Interpretors categories) 
* grep -- text search tool (Base category) 
* libiconv -- character set conversion (Devel category) 
* make -- dependency analyzer for software builds (Devel category) (not mandatory if the version is 3.81 -- we need 3.80)
* patchutils -- a small collection of programs that operate on patch files (Devel category) 
* perl -- a scripting language used to control parts of the build (Interpreters category) 
* sed -- a search and replace language (Base category) 
* unzip -- zip file extraction (Archive category) 
* zip -- zip file creation (Archive category)

• Make 3.80 (to overwrite the 3.81 version from the Cygwin install)

Once MAKE is downloaded and saved on your hard drive:

1. Use WinRAR to extract the file to any folder of your choosing.
2. Copy the make.exe file located within the usr/bin folder and overwrite the make.exe located in C:\cygwin\bin 

• MozTools | More Info

Once downloaded, extract the contents to any location. Remember the location though as you will need to edit your batch file with this location.

• Microsoft ® Windows Server® 2003 R2 Platform SDK | More Info