The Open Source U

This is a follow up post to a series I’ve been posting. The previous post to this posting was “Firefox – Found time to Try again!”

I finally was able to get Firefox to build on my Vista machine. It has given me a lot of trouble and I’ve had to troubleshoot several times. Relative to my previous post, I was last held up on a “NSInstall” error. NSinstall.exe would report “Bad File Number”.

The solution was reducing the directory depth. I had my mercurial repository in a sub folder of my documents folder. Specifically C:\Users\Frank\Documents\hg-repos\mozilla-fv-expirement\. I moved the directory to C:\mozilla-fv-expirement\ and re-ran the build script. It did it’s thing and I was able to fire up good-’ol firefox.exe from the [...]\dist\bin folder. I even checked my gmail account on it.

Now where?

I felt that before I started hacking and understanding the source code, I should be able to build the program. That way, if I make a significant change I can see how the code base reacts to it. Though, my intentions are not to hack but to understand how it works. The ability to drop print statements in should help with this… maybe…

Additionally, I hope to contribute to the Mozilla Litmus QA system. I might as well — I did take the time to build the trunk.

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.

This site was established with the my express desired to learn how  certain major open source software packages work; this was to be a personal endeavor to broaden my horizons.

As it turns out, I ended up enrolling in graduate school. I’m pursuing a Master of Science in Software Engineering — something I’ve been planing since my B.S. (which is as represented).

I lost my focus on this site but I don’t want to. I want to regain that focus and this is my first post to that end.

This post is the information I gather while setting up to review and understand how Mozilla’s FireFox works.

Getting Started with Firefox

A while back, before I had even started writing this post, I posted a question on StackoverFlow.com about how to learn about how FireFox works. I’ve received some great answers.

The answer I chose to accept was from jbinto; who gave a wonderful detailed answer and list of resources to pursue this. I’ll be utilizing these resources along with my own method of stumbling though the code.

I’ve started with the Windows Build Prerequisites page since I’ll be building on windows (vista). I imagine my greatest audience will be Windows users and hence I’ll stick with windows. But I do use Linux and Mac OS X too, so if you have a question about these environments, post a comment and I’ll try to address it.

I’ve downloaded and installed the package. It apparently includes everything you need to build FireFox — Including the Source Control Tool and diffing utilities and such.

I want to work on the latest tip; but apparently, the FireFox team uses Mercurial as their source control tool. I’ve never used this tool so this is good and bad. I can learn to tool but I  have to spend the scarce resource of time to do so. I’ll be taking a short deviation way from my current plan to learn the Mercurial basics.

I won’t be posting much on how to use Mercurial as there is plenty of documentation. Anyway, off to learn about Mercurial — I shall continue with this article series once I’ve obtained the tip of FireFox.

Any one that would care probably knows already but the Windows 7 RC is available for Microsoft.

You can get more information at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353271.aspx