FireFox – Getting Source Code from Mercurial and 1st build
This is a follow up post to FireFox — Getting Started. Consider this more of a status post to show my progress in the previously linked post.
I’ve orientated myself on Mercurial a bit but I still have a lot to learn. I must state now that it is completely different from Subversion (SVN) and CVS. If you are new to systems like Mercurial — otherwise known as Distributed Source Control Management systems, I suggest you study up on them. The Mozilla team has put together a great starting out reference which is here and the Mercurial team has put together a great book here.
You can get information on getting the latest tip of “mozilla-central” from the following web page:
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Developer_Guide/Source_Code/Mercurial
One tip I do want to leave here for others is that you should clone the mozilla-central repository twice. Once from the http site and once from the new local copy.
The first one, which I call clean, is a exact clone of the mozilla-central from Mozilla. I then clone this local repository and work in this new clone. I call this local clone working. With this setup, if you massively screw up your working directory, you can always re-clone your clean copy. I believe I read this in the Mercurial book.
My First Build
This series of blogs posts is actually suppose to be focused on the construction and (in some ways) development of FireFox. But, for me the first step to understanding a given project is to be able to compile or build it and run it. If you can’t build or run it, you can see what your hacking is doing to the results.
I’ve been able to successfully build the source code, however not on Windows as I had hoped. At least not yet. I’ve successfully built it on my Mac OS X machine.
Anyway, I continue with my quest to build on Windows as I suspect most of my research will be on my Windows Vista machine.
I’m not going to include how to build Firefox here. The Mozilla team has done a wonderful job documenting how to build on each environment and furthermore, they have set everything up to be newbie friendly.
My only advice at this point, is to go from top to bottom — don’t skip steps and install everything that they ask. Quite simply, if you skip around without knowing what you are skipping, your build won’t build and the error messages can’t tell you what you are missing. You end up reviewing the directions from top to bottom again.
Again, here are the Simple FireFox build instructions from Mozilla.
