Distcc mozilla tutorial

What is this?

This is a tutorial to get distcc to compile Mozilla Firefox on cygwin.

Requirements

1. Window machines. For distcc to be of any use, there should be at least 2 machines
2. Cygwin. You will need gcc to build distcc. We built using gcc-3.4.4
3. Mozilla requirements
4. Patience

MOZCONFIG

Currently, distcc does not transmit debug .pdb files. So you cannot currently do a debug build. Here is a sample MOZCONFIG file. All you need to do is modify the object directory (MOZ_OBJDIR).

Note the last line, which is required for any MOZCONFIG file that wants to build using distcc.

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=/cygdrive/c/home/cesar/mozobj
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-debugger-info-modules=no
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="CC='distcc cl' CXX='distcc cl' -j4"

Environment

This section explains some usefull environment variables that you can use.

Distcc has a few environment variables. The most useful are listed here, which are all set on the master computer. The master machine is the machine in which the mozilla directory is located.

DISTCC_CL_HOSTS

the ip addresses of the slave machines. Usually localhost is the first host. THIS IS REQUIRED Example : export DISTCC_CL_HOSTS="localhost 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.4

DISTCC_VERBOSE

Verbose output. Values : 1 for true

DISTCC_LOG

A path to a file that distcc will output to

DISTCC_FALLBACK

Whether distcc should fallback to localhost if it fails to find a slave. The compile will fail if fallback are disabled and no slaves are found. Values : 1 for allow fallback

Optional

DISTCC_FALLBACK