Building Firefox

This is my first experience of building Firefox on a local machine. I followed the This simple Firefox build. I downloaded MozillaBuild and installed it on my laptop. My laptop is 32 bit Windows 7. I got VS2008 and SDK v6.0A installed. Everything was checked. So I ran the command c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc8.bat and cloned the repository from the server. However I ran into a problem.




After a few tries, it still failed. So I googled it and found out that my Avira antivirus cause the problem. I disabled it and my firewall. Finally, it completed the clone about 2 hours on my wireless connection.



I notice that it copied to c:/mozilla-central/mozilla-central. This could be part of the repos already copied to my hard drive when the connection dropped. And it prevented me from copying to the same directory. This was my mozconfig.

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ojbdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-debug
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --with-windows-version=502

For some reason the compiler did not like SDK 6.0A, because I did not update my VS2008 to sp1. So I try the quick fix and set --with-windows-version=502 to save some time. Then I ran make -f client.mk command.




Finally I got FireFox build on my laptop.
So What I learned so far about building Firefox?
- make sure all requisites installed before the clone (this could save a lot of time and headache latter).
- disable firewall and antivirus
- use wire connection instead of wireless connection.