User:Moe/Assignment1
Contents
: Research
- At first I had decided to build Firefox using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP. No knowing where to start I did what I usually do when I don’t have a clue about something. I googled it. Using the following search query “build Firefox using visual studio” in google I was directed to [1].
- I followed the instructions on that page up to the point where the buildsetup.bat needed to be executed. It did not work. I was unable to execute the script. I knew this because it wasn’t setting up the correct environmental variables for CVS to work properly. After an hour of struggle with this problem I decided to give up on Windows and decided to try my luck with OS X.
- I searched google with the following query “mac osx build firefox” and this page [2] was returned as one of the search results.
: Hardware and Software Requirements
- Hardware
- I didn’t care much about the hardware requirements listed on the Build Documentation page because I knew that my laptop was a fairly recent model [2 years old] and that the only reason why they usually require high system requirements is mostly to lower the time that it takes to compile code.
- Software
- Xcode: I already had Xcode installed since I had used it before in my BTP course. Xcode provided me with the SDKs that were required for building Firefox as well as the build tools like the gcc 3.3 compiler.
- DarwinPorts: The Mozilla prerequisites page for building Firefox on OS X recommends the installation of DarwinPorts, a package management system, in order to install libIDL, Glib and autoconf. I also had DarwinPorts installed on my computer.
: Problems encountered & Resolutions
- When compiling Firefox I realized that I was missing the QuickTime, CoreAudio and the OpenGL SDK. To resolve this issue I re-downloaded Xcode and installed the missing files.
- After I added the missing SDKs I was still unable to compile and I would get the same build error message over and over again. After many build attempts I realized that the old object files that were compiled before, when I was missing the SDKs, were causing the build process to fail. The removal of the object files with in the objdir resulted it a successful build of Firefox.
