Don’t ever use in-tree mozconfigs

I just saw two related gists about how some people are building Firefox.

Both are doing the same mistake, which is not really surprising, since one is based on the other. As I'm afraid people might pick that up, I'm posting this:

Don't ever use in-tree mozconfigs

If your mozconfig contains something like

. $topsrcdir/something

Then remove it. Now.

Those mozconfigs are for use in automated builds. They make many assumptions on the build environment being the one from the build slaves. Local developers shouldn't need anything but minimalistic, self contained mozconfigs. If there are things that can be changed in the build system to accommodate developers, file bugs (I could certainly see the .noindex thing automatically added to MOZ_OBJDIR by default on mac)

Corollary: if you can't build Firefox without a mozconfig (for a reason other than your build environment missing build requirements), file a bug.

2014-05-14 02:27:50+0900

p.m.o

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3 Responses to “Don’t ever use in-tree mozconfigs”

  1. Dave Townsend Says:

    Fun since we always used to recommend that you source at least “$topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig”.

    Are the docs that still recommend sourcing various mozconfigs in the tree still correct? e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Configuring_Build_Options

  2. glandium Says:

    > Fun since we always used to recommend that you source at least “$topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig”.

    That one is fine-ish. It only contains –enable-application=browser, which is the default anyways.

    > Are the docs that still recommend sourcing various mozconfigs in the tree still correct? e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Configuring_Build_Options

    Those example mozconfigs are … not actual examples, they are the actual mozconfigs we use for automation. It makes no sense to put them there as examples.

  3. Paul Says:

    Fixed my gist.