Rebuilding libxul made slightly easier, finally
One of the longstanding problems when modifying code in the mozilla code base, is that when you change some file under e.g. content/, and you don't want to waste the whole lot of time it takes to run a complete make -f client.mk, you need to build under content/, then layout/build/, and finally toolkit/library/. And you need to remember that (or use tools that remember for you).
These days are finally over. After several attempts a year ago (!), and again several attempts during the past weeks, bug 644608 is finally on mozilla-central and is likely to stick, this time. There may be some corner cases, in which case please file bugs.
Anyways, Now, you just need to build under e.g. content/ and toolkit/library/. No need to rebuild layout/build/ anymore.
2012-04-12 19:41:53+0900
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2012-04-12 19:51:06+0900
In fact, in some cases, building in
toolkit/library/only is enough. It’s not the general case, though, and I don’t advise doing so.2012-04-12 21:02:42+0900
What is the difference in build times (say for a small change in one file) between this approach and running make -f client.mk?
2012-04-13 07:43:58+0900
On my machine, it’s 15 seconds instead of more than a minute.
2012-04-13 10:14:03+0900
So the idea now is that you only need to rebuild the top-level folder + toolkit/library? Does it also work for the deps that are picked up by docshell/build?
2012-04-13 11:14:46+0900
Felipe: you only need to rebuild the directory where you made your changes and toolkit/library. Provided your changes are in something that ends up in libxul.
2012-04-15 03:41:49+0900
I think this made partial builds quite a bit slower on Windows. Prior to this change, building layout/generic + layout/build + toolkit/library took about 10 seconds or less. Now building the same (with or without layout/build) takes 30s and more… (either way it rebuilds xul.lib).