How to prepare a Mozilla Building and Debuging Environment.

The following information is about Firefox 3.0 and mozilla-xulrunner 1.9.0 on SUSE Linux. Please following the steps below:

1. Grab MozillaFirefox 3.0.x and mozilla-xulrunner 1.9.0.x packages, and extract their contents to directory MozillaFirefox and mozilla-xulrunner190.
   
2. Use quilt to apply patches to mozilla-xulrunner190:
   
   
   
   1. use quilt -v setup mozilla-xulrunner190.spec to setup the xulrunner 1.9.0 source tree.
      
   2. change directory to mozilla-xulrunner190/mozilla, using quilt push -a, to apply all xulrunner 1.9.0 patches.
      
   3. use quilt import to import all patches in MozillaFirefox packages, as we put Firefox patches in two seperate packages containing different patches.
      
   
   
3. Put a mozconfig in directory mozilla-xulrunner190/mozilla, contains the following informations:
   

   
     . $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
     mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-debug
     ac_add_options --enable-debug
     ac_add_options --disable-optimize
   

   
   
4. Type the command "make -f client.mk build" in directory mozilla-xulrunner190/mozilla.
   
5. Wait for compiling finished, go to directory objdir-ff-debug/dist/bin, using "./firefox" to run the built Firefox 3.0.
   

In SUSE Mozilla Team now.

Since February 2009, I was transfered from i18n team to Mozilla team in Novell.
Although it is a tough task, but it is also interesting to me.

Recent months I am very busy, thanks for the help from Wolfgang. Later maybe I can spend more time on making patches. :)

As I spend lots of time about how to debug Firefox bugs on SUSE Linux. I will write some series of articles to ease others to join developing Mozilla Firefox on SUSE Linux.