Building Firefox 1.5

Assignment 1 - Building the Fox

Written By Mark Paruzel.
THIS IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!

Introduction

I have built Firefox before for a previous assignment I did and it was dead simple. Building Firefox 3.0 is as easy as riding a bike; building Firefox 1.5 is like attempting to start a fire, 30 feet under water. Its painful. So, hopefully these instructions will make it a bit easier then the instructions available on the MDC.

Required Software

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 (MSVC 7.1)
2. Cygwin
3. Make 3.80 for Cygwin
4. Moztools & Wintools
5. Patience!!!

Build Instructions

Visual Studio 2003

• Visual Studio is available at the school ACS office/website so you can grab it from there and install it. Its easy to install it because the installer is idiot proof. This shouldn't be hard :).

Cygwin

• Cygwin is avilable for download Here. Install it with the following tools:
  • ash -- UNIX-like command line interpreter shell (Base category)
  • coreutils -- GNU core utilities (includes fileutils, sh-utils, and textutils) (Base category)
  • diffutils -- file comparison utility (Base category)
  • findutils (Base category)
  • gawk -- pattern matching language (Base and Interpretors categories)
  • grep -- text search tool (Base category)
  • make -- dependency analyzer for software builds (Devel category)
  • 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

• Unfortunately, Cygwin no longer is bundled with make 3.80, rather its bundled with 3.81-1 which breaks duing the Firefox build.
• To get the version of make that works (3.80), you have to download it here. Once you have download it, you can just grab the Make executable file (make.exe) from /usr/bin/ directory and drop it into Cywgin/bin (this will overwrite the existing Make executable).
• While your doing this, make sure Cygwin is not running. If it is, you will need to restart Cygwin.

Setting Up Your Build Directory

• Start up Cygwin and navigate to your C drive:

$> cd /cygdrive/c/
$> pwd
/cygdrive/c

• We need to create a place where we will do all our development. I used a directory called proj:

$> mkdir proj
$> cd proj
$> pwd
/cygdrive/c/proj

• Inside this directory, we will put all of our tools and batch files we will use to setup the build environment:

$> touch buildsetup.bat

• The buildsetup.bat will set up the environment variables for us, which we will do in a different section.

Moztools And Wintools

• There are two tool packages that are required to build Firefox using VS 7.1. These two tools are called Moztools and Wintools.
• Download these two zip files and extrat thier contents into your C:\proj\ directory.

$> pwd
/cygdrive/c/proj
$> ls -al

Setting Up The Environment

• At this point, the Cygwin Environment is basically set up. You now have the tools required to automate the build process as well as the compiler to do the grunt work.
• Before you can start to build, you need to set up a bunch of environment variables so that the make files know where to look for dependencies. I created a build batch file that set up the environment for me:

BuildSetup.bat goes here

Glib And LibIDL For VC 7.1

Glib and libIDL for VC71

Pulling From CVS

Building

Problems Encountered & Solutions

xpidl.exe Crashes

Resources Used

• David Humphrey's site on how to build Firefox
• Official Mozilla Instructions on building the 1.8.0 Branch
• Jeff Walden's Page On Building Firefox

Conclusion

It took me almost a week to figure out what to pull from CVS, setting up the environment variables, build, finding what i did wrong and rebuilding 6 more times...In other words, it was a pain. Fortunately, Firefox got built so now I can get on with trying to run it through the VS Debugger.