Building the Fox

WORK IN PROGRESS

Aim

To build the Mozilla Firefox browser from source code.

Apparatus

Hardware

AMD Athlon XP @ 1.82 GHz 512 MB RAM

Software

• Microsoft® Windows XP® Professional with Service Pack 2.
• Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET 2003® (with C++ module installed).(available from ACS: Disc 0 (Pre-requesite), Disc 1, Disc 2)
• Cygwin
• moztools
• Microsoft ® Windows Server® 2003 R2 Platform SDK
• NISS Installer
• Make 3.80 (Needed to overwrite make 3.81 which is part of the Cygwin default install)

Method

Install all software in the default directory as it saves time and effort in the long run.

Appendix

Batch File

SET CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot
SET CVS_RSH=ssh

rem --- Set HOME so that cvs and ssh work correctly
rem --- cvs uses HOME to locate your .cvspass file, and ssh to locate your .ssh file
rem --- if you are using ssh, your HOME should match the home directory specified
in /etc/passwd. See http://www.cygwin.com/faq/faq0.html.
set HOME=C:\home

rem --- Set VCVARS to wherever the MSVC vcvars.bat file is found
set VCVARS=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vc7\bin\vcvars32.bat

rem --- Set MSSDK to wherever the MS SDK is installed
rem --- Only required for MSVC7 or the Free MSVC editions that don't come with an SDK
set MSSDK=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2

rem --- Set MOZ_TOOLS to wherever you have the moztools packaged installed
set MOZ_TOOLS=C:\moztools\moztools-static\moztools

rem --- Set CYGWINBASE to wherever cygwin is installed
rem --- Do not use CYGWIN or else cygserver, cygrunsrv, and Cygwin services will not function
properly
rem --- Variable CYGWIN is also used to modify Cygwin's behaviour a little bit.
set CYGWINBASE=C:\cygwin
rem --- Make sure Cygwin does not print out a DOS style path warning
set CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning

rem --- Prepend Cygwin path
rem --- This is necessary so that cygwin find is ahead of windows find.exe in the PATH, but
cgywin link is after MSVC link.exe.
set PATH=%CYGWINBASE%\bin;%PATH%

rem --- Set MSVC environment vars
call "%VCVARS%"

rem --- Prepend SDK paths
rem --- Only required for MSVC7 or the Free MSVC editions that don't come with an SDK
set PATH=%MSSDK%\bin;%PATH%
set INCLUDE=%MSSDK%\include;%INCLUDE%
set LIB=%MSSDK%\lib;%LIB%

rem --- moztools comes last
set PATH=%PATH%;%MOZ_TOOLS%\bin

rem --- Now the PATH variable contains:
rem MS-SDK; MSVC; Cygwin; Windows; glib/libIDL; Moztools

rem --- Typically the last thing the script does is launch a cygwin shell
rem --- watch for your ~/.profile and /etc/profile which may overwrite your carefully setup
PATH!
bash --login -i

.mozconfig File

# Building Firefox Trunk with Debugging
. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig

# Put all obj files in one place, not in src tree
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/firefox-objdir
ac_add_options --disable-static
ac_add_options --enable-shared

# Debug Build Setup Options
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-debug

# I'm using Canvas for my work
ac_add_options --enable-canvas

ac_add_options --disable-installer