This is coming a bit late on my part since my desktop was having some hard drive issues. Well, I finally got that cleared up (ended up having to reformat my computer) and proceeded to build Firefox from source. So I headed over to the build instructions and started following the steps for the Windows platform…
Requirements
- Building Gecko 1.9 (trunk)
- Requires Visual Studio 2008 (check, got that)
- Requires Visual C++ 9 (Downloaded and installed Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition, check, done!)
- Microsoft Windows SDKs
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Platform SDK (check, installed!)
- Software Development Kit
- MozillaBuild (Installed!)
So after all the prerequisites were ready I got one of the bash scripts found in C:mozilla-build running. It passed all the initial checkups and gave me the command prompt. Awesome!
Source
Already had that downloaded and ready to go!
Configuring Build Options
Now .mozconfig needed to be setup. This can be tricky from what I hear. This file will hold all my build options. The following is how my mozconfig file looks like…
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/../obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@
Build
I ran the build by typing make -f client.mk build. My build ramped up and started to run but eventually I got an error…
“configure: error: –enable-application=APP was not specified and is required”
I ran the command ./configure –enable-application=browser to fix this error. It’s weird though since I have –enable-application=browser in my .mozconfig file already so why do I have to explicitly invoke it from the command line?
The build took around an hour as various unreadable compile data zoomed by as I looked on. At the end I didn’t know whether the build succeeded or not. It would have been nice to see a message clearly telling me that the build had been successful or not like. Nonetheless, I checked my source folder and found the minefield exe ready to run.
