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