Tales of building Firefox

I’ve done several different versions of .mozconfig and compiled them while in class, and for the most part I ignored a line that allowed for make to do multiple concurrent things. So I thought of trying it out, and lo and behold it worked for my laptop. Fast forward 4 or so hours back at home, I wanted to do this for my desktop as well (there’s nothing wrong with it per se , it’s just in a really long ugly directory name). Since I had a little time to waste I thought I’d quickly edit my mozconfig file and throw it up to make and I’ll get a finished build in no time. Instead I get ***INTERNAL: readdir: Bad file number and the occasional rm: cannot lstat `conftest.exe': Permission denied. It seems that when I remove mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAG=-j4 from my .mozconfig it will run fine.

Earlier today in class, Dave said that we should be happy with walls of text, I can definitely see why that’s a bonus. If you don’t see anything, you can’t possibly know where to start. However I’m feeling more than overwhelmed when I’m confronted with a wall of text that’s ALL warnings. It almost feels like every little thing I do, kills Firefox a little on the inside.

Another thing I’ve kinda bumped into is that for my debug mode for Firefox has some issue with Adblock Plus. The error I get:

Before I learned of the handy-dandy XPCOM_DEBUG_BREAK system variable, FF would just stop running and close. When I ran this via command prompt (I have a habit of double clicking to open) I get something like this when FF stops working: (It’s actually a lot less in terms of the number being leaked, this happened to be the first time it happened when I ran it via command prompt so I took a screen shot then)

Even weirder is when I build FF normally and test out Adblock Plus… it works perfectly fine. Although I assume it’s because normally FF would just suppress the assertion error.

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On to 0.3 Milestone…

I’m going to continue to work on the blip.tv video player. I think I’ll be able to have the basic code done by the weekend. While I don’t think I’ll be done (I’ll need to do revisions I’m sure), I’ll be picking up another bug. After chatting with Dave on irc, I was given the A-Okay to look into why Firefox might be misreading my game pads. The issue is that for two of my three game pads, the right stick’s Y-axis is mapped to another button or the Dpad. The first step would be to find out where I should be looking… and on that front, I was told to talk to ted.

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A side note: while looking through the numerous documents of debugging on the MDN, I found links to posts describing how to do the editing and debugging on Visual Studio IDE as well as a way to make a prettier console than the ugly one I have now.