Hey all, Today I'm going to build Firefox on Windows 7. I've never done this before so it's going to involve many google searches :-D
First thing I did was search for "how to compile Firefox on Windows". This provided me a link to The Windows Build Prerequisites on the Mozilla Developers Network.
My laptop has Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, so that means I'm limited to building from these branches: mozilla-central\tracemonkey\comm-central, Gecko 2 and later, Gecko 4 and later. this is good. I was planning on building mozilla-central. I also learned that I needed to download the MozillaBuild package, which contains tools used in the build process.
I downloaded and installed the tools, then found a link to this page which has platform specific steps for building Firefox. I learned I needed to check if I had the right Windows SDK, which according to the SDK Versions page, Visual Studio 2010 should come with out of the box.
After I was (almost sure) I was ready, I opened a command line and ran: start-msvc10.bat in the mozilla-build directory of my hard drive. This opened The mozilla build environment.
The next step was to download the source code (holy crap long time!) by running
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/
in the build environment. after a while I noticed it had finally finished (47143 files updated!) I moved into the mozilla-central folder I just created.
The next thing i did was run these commands, which I'm told point to the build directory.
echo '. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig' > mozconfig
echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release' >> mozconfig
Lastly I ran:
make -f client.mk
And now I'm waiting......... and waiting..... and waiting :-P
Uh-oh! after over an hour there's an error >.<
I'm not sure what happened, but Trunk does not want to build on my machine.
something about "[plugin-container.exe] error 31" which I cannot find any information on.
NEW STRATEGY!
I have downloaded the source for Firefox 4.0b6 and created a mozconfig file in the root of the directory.
The build took just as long as trunk, but completed successfully! Runs fine too! W00T.
I'm going to try and compile trunk again to see if the first failure was just a one in a million thing.
In the meantime I'm going to learn jquery
UPDATE:
I got Trunk to build the second time, without any trouble! It most likely had to do with the fact that the first time I tried I used the command:
make -f client.mk
When I should have put:
make -f client.mk build