I'm not a developer.
Since about two and a half years ago I've been compiling binaries of Mozilla from source pretty regularly. I first attempted to build on MS Windows and after a few days of pain and no build I moved over to a Mac. With some help from scc this proved to be much easier and I happily used my mac for building until about a year ago when I decided to give it another try on Windows. With some help from Jason and Stuart I was able to get up and running.
The problem with building Mozilla on Windows is that it requires so much setup. I had to install and configure cygwin. I had to install some mozilla-specific tools and libraries. I had to set up my windows environment, getting all my variables and paths and whatnot just so, and then balance all these pieces to make a build happen.
I'm successfully building Mozilla and Phoenix [file removed for bandwidth considerations] on windows and thought I'd see what it takes on Linux. So today I moved over to my linux box and gave it a shot. Boy was I surprised.
I created a build directory, set my cvs root, typed cvs co mozilla/client.mk, cd'd into mozilla/, typed make -f client.mk and bang! my build was off to the races. What a joy. Now I know why the linux folks around here claim that windows is a pita. It's not the building that's hard. It's the setup and windows is just plain hard for a non-developer like me.
I should probably do a little more building on Linux before I declare it the king of Mozilla build platforms. I think that building on Windows is faster but getting set up for the first time is not even in the same league.
Posted by asa at August 9, 2002 09:57 PM