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.

My attempts to build Firefox on windows continue today. If you recall , previously, I’ve had great success with Mac OS X which I tried by chance but I’ve had problems while attempting the same thing on Windows.

This experience has made me decided that my troubles with building open source program in the past has stemmed from my usage of non-unix based operating systems — Windows — and my lack of understand about make, autoconf, python and perl.

Ok, lets go….

I’ve updated to the latest tip of Mozilla Central and at this very moment, I’m at revision 80f4cdc242b9. I expect to be working with this revision throughout the remainder of this post. Though, in general the exact revision shouldn’t matter if you are attempting the same thing.

I’ve just tried to build with the command make -f client.mk

I’ve received an error and while writing this I just thought of why. It’s stupid reason but one is bound to make mistakes like this. Simply put, I forgot the very required mozconfig file. I cloned my “clean” repository to a new directory to start over and I forgot this file. For records (and search engines) the exact error I received was “configure: error: –enable-application=APP was not specified and is required.”

So, now lets actually follow the directions since we are not experts.

I’ve reread the MDC about building Firefox and I’ve created a .mozconfig files. I’ll put it below for my and your reference. Don’t assume you should use this — check out the Mozilla docs. They are very straight forward.

# My first mozilla config - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Configuring_Build_Options

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

# Use the follow two for debugging (if desired)
# ac_add_options --enable-debug    
# ac_add_options --enable-tests

The # is the comment indicator and as you can see, I’ve setup but not enabled my options for debugging. I hope to use these later but for now I’ve decided to disable them.

Given the above .mozconfig file, I’ve attempted to rebuild and run in to an apparent known issue with building on Vista. Mozilla has done a beautiful job document the reason and how to fix it.The exact error is: “configure: error: System header oleacc.idl is not available” but right afterward the URL is given.

To correct this problem, Mozilla has listed three options. I’ve elected to attempt the “Use Windows 2008 SDK” option. I wasn’t sure which to pick but I decided that the 2008 SDK seems to be supported as the site states “Unfortunately, the Vista or Windows 2008 SDKs are required to build Mozilla”. I wish the page made a recommendation or gave pros and cons but perhaps it doesn’t matter…

The next error

After getting the Windows 2008 SDK installed and up to date, I received another error. This time the error read “nsinstall: Bad file number”. I’m not sure where to go from here, so I posted at the usenet.

The prevalent solution was to run as administrator, according to these two articles:

• Penelope Developer Page
• kevin brosnan dot net

This hasn’t worked for me; I’m still trying to figure this out. Apparently, my success is not going to come today so I’m setting this aside for the time being.

In the hopes of continuing soon, I’ve posted two questions:

• Usenet
• Stack Overflow

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