On 12/5/05, Dan Nicholson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This is not intended to start an argument, but I really am just curious. > > If in fact both methods do produce the same results, what is mozilla's > > reason behind their suggested method and why was it ever considered a > > good thing to break from it in the first place? > > I'm kind of speculating, but these are the major reasons, I think: > 1. They have a lot of custom autoconf type scripts to hash out the > myriad options and arches that it's built for. This is kind of what I > pointed out: instead of passing a 30 line configure statement, you can > use a simple text file. This method allows to also use the default > options a lot easier. It's pretty straightforward to get stock > firefox with . $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig. > > 2. There's a lot of custom CVS pulling stuff in there to handle the > tons of branches and projects they have. client.mk makes it sane to > maintain a single source tree and try to build multiple projects from > it. Have you ever taken a look at their CVS tree? It's insane: > http://lxr.mozilla.org/ And, yes, there are people who successfully > build multiple projects (suite, browser, etc.) from a single source > tree.
I thought about this a little more and I think there's a more compelling reason for the Moz developers. The mozilla base code supports tons of projects: suite (Mozilla/Seamonkey), browser (Firefox), mail (Thunderbird), minimo, composer (NVU), xulrunner, macbrowser (Camino), standalone (xpcom). In order to have any sanity in their build system (rather than passing 30 parameters to configure and hoping that you got them all right), they added custom tools on top to make it easier to specify which application you want. This goes along with #2 above and the CVS. Makes pulls much easier. Underneath, all the same things are there: a configure shell script, Makefiles with standard targets, and CVS tags for checkout/checkin. -- Dan -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
