Firefox build

Well, after a few problems, Firefox seems to be building fine now. It's been compiling for about twelve minutes, and before my problems all seemed to be early in the build, so I hope I'm out of the woods now.

The hardest part was simply downloading the files I needed to do this. I felt like there was no guide giving step by step instructions all in one place, but parts of guides. And, it seemed all of the parts vary for different machines and versions. It was up to me to learn it, understand it, and make the right choices.

Google was not much help in getting answers to my specific error messages, so what I would end up doing, when I hit a problem I didn't understand, I would go back a step or two, and try again, paying close attention to what is happening, and I may go back more than one step, or in some cases, right back to the beginning until I understand it. Each pass through I knew more and more, and by going back, I could see things with a knowledgeable eye, and stuff just sort of clicked.

Anyway, on to my specific errors and how I solved them. Once I got the commands working understood, I started using the make command, until I figured that out, and my first error was something to do with --enable-application=APP, which made no sense at the time. I was trying things like adding it to the end of the make command, and moving my .mozconfig file around. I read that it was important, and I thought I had it. But, it turned out I had a .mozconfig.mk and .mozconfig.out, which are not the same. I needed to create it myself, and then add the --enable-application-APP command there, so I tried that, still didn't work. I think found some advice on the web, with "ac_add_options --enable-application=browser" thinking I needed ac_add_options before my =APP, still didn't work. So, I tried "ac_add_options --enable-application=browser" without APP and browser instead. And voila, it seems to be going error free. In fact, it's still going, and I think it's going to finish problem free from this point on. If there are any more problems, I'll be back to edit this post, actually, I;ll be back if it works too.

So, it completed with what I think is no errors, although, It took me awhile to figure out how to install it. I found something under the name of Namoroka, which I believe to be it, so I installed it. It installed fine, or what I thought, but it would run, said it was missing Firefox.exe, so I aded that, just out of curiosity, then it wanted a .dll, and it kept going. So eventually I found all the files in one location in the firefox build files, so I just copied it all into the Namoroka folder. It now has no errors, but no program is actually started. Ah well, I think though, that's all I have time for and is a good amount for only an hour (7:38 - 8:48) little more than an hour. Anyway, I have to wake up tomorrow at 5:00 to make it to Java EE on time tomorrow.