building firefox 1.5 with cygwin

Begin by reading this post which covers the steps in detail

http://gemal.dk/mozilla/build.html

After reading over the documentation, I decided to try to build firefox with a default cygwin environment and using the cygwin shell.

Here are the steps:


01. download wintools.zip from

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/source/wintools.zip

create the build directory for the tools

mkdir c:\mozilla
mkdir c:\mozilla\moztools

unzip to a temp location for example c:\temp
result c:\temp\wintools
cd c:\temp\wintools\buildtools\windows
install.bat
run this script and use c:\mozilla\moztools


02. go to the cygwin site and download the entire distribution which is 630 MBytes

http://www.cygwin.com/setup.exe

I know it is possible to use a subset of the cygwin distribution but
the setup program is hard to explain and not easy for a novice
Run the setup.exe program, choose a mirror and download.
You can install at the same time but I prefer to install after
the download. For the install location use c:\cygwin


03. Download the firefox 1.5 source

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5.0.1/source/

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5/source/firefox-1.5-source.tar.bz2

with the project notes here

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Download_Mozilla_Source_Code


I use 7-zip and unzipped the file in a temp location. Move the mozilla subfolder to
c:\mozilla with the result being c:\mozilla\mozilla


04. Use the cygwin shell and cygwin env for the build

open a cygwin shell

cd /cygdrive/c/mozilla/mozilla

MOZTOOLS=/cygdrive/c/mozilla/moztools
export MOZ_TOOLS

PATH=$PATH:$MOZ_TOOLS/bin


05. Here is my example .mozconfig file which needs to be created in
c:\mozilla\mozilla with the result being c:\mozilla\mozilla\.mozconfig


$topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
CFLAGS=-mno-cygwin
CXXFLAGS=-mno-cygwin
CC=gcc
CXX=g++
CPP=cpp
AS=as
LD=ld
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility
ac_add_options --disable-activex




06. Execute the build, prepare for a 6 hour wait

make -f client.mk build_all_depend


If everything goes well you will find the firefox executable in

c:\mozilla\mozilla\dist\bin\firefox.exe