Minefield build!

Building Firefox was... not as mysterious as I had first expected.

I always knew FF was open source, and that the source code was out there somewhere. It would require a strange compiler setup and more symbolic links than pebbles at a beach. Since writing large amounts of source code was always an ordeal and linkers have rendered some projects dead for me, compiling browsers fits into the "arcane magic" category.

I was quite pleased to find that the compiler configuration was well-documented and largely automated. I also discovered the true advantages of utilities like "make".


The one quirk I ran into was this:

$ make -f client.mk build

If you follow the online documentation exactly, they will ask you to run this code. For me, it failed to start compiling. They didn't even suggest that there'd be other options, like running "make" without any arguments.

If my computer's specific configuration is an exception, I could understand. I suspect that other Windows users may run into similar problems. I'm curious to see if this command failed for anyone else.

It feels like the documentation is too fragmented. They'll link to several different setup processes for different OS's, and expect all of them to work exactly the same. "One size fits all" code (like that "make -f client.mk build") is just too good to be true, but the documentation buys into it anyways.


Full details on my adventure can be found here.

Special thanks to Zghansar, who made my experience magically easy.