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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

It has been a while since I last tried compiling Firefox, so I don't know if things have improved. In some of my previous setup and build attempts I ended up giving up out of frustration. Just updating the docs would probably be of huge help to many users.

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I'll add a +1 to this very issue. I likewise am not sure if it's still the case, but a few years ago I was looking into contributing some ES2015 implementations to the FF JS engine but couldn't get Firefox to compile based on the docs. I get that software development involves some amount of grit to grind out a problem and solve it, but to have to do so right at the beginning of possibly contributing to an open source project was asking just a bit too much of my free time and I bailed and have never made the attempt again.

Fwiw if you go to their irc server and go into the introduction channel you can get help on stuff like this. The artifact builds are also much quicker to download and compile too if you don't need to change the c++ core.

Building SpiderMonkey is not hard at all today: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Sp...

The only issue is that you have to clone whole mozilla-central even if you only work with small part of it. But once you pull it, the building and hacking on it is quite easy :)

Firefox does try to make it easy to build. However they're quite opinionated and want you to use a "bootstrap" script which downloads some stuff into ~/.mozbuild regardless of you potentially already having it.

It is however still very close to a clone & bootstrap & build process, at least on Linux and Mac - i.e. one of the better projects. (For comparison, I recently tried to build Facebook's Infer, and that was even worse than building OpenOffice back in the day.)

Firefox now has artifact builds, so if you're not contributing to the C++ portions (the UI or whatever) it will just download build artifacts for you.

If you do want to tweak the native code it should just be ./mach boostrap + ./mach build, but it's entirely possible you'll have trouble with that.

More and more it feels that self-compiling is not a considered usage for large projects. Instead if you compile at all, you do so as part of a distro maintenance team. And thus should be on all the relevant mailing lists and irc channels, and keeping notes.

At least that is how it feels to me after having spent some years using a distro that is a fair bit more hands on than most.

What about development? You need to be able to compile to test feature implementation and bug fixes.

Nightly automated builds...

This is definitely relatable. I've lost interest in many projects after wasting hours trying to get things to compile.

The worst offender I've encountered has been android. The initial checkout is like +100GB, and it has incredibly poor fault tolerance. Based on my experience, it fails regularly at random points, requiring you to re-fetch everything. Despite multi-day efforts, I've never managed to build a ROM for my Nexus 5X or Pixel.

I've always had trouble compiling large projects. The only one I got working with no issues along the way was ReactOS, which (in a twist of fate) will not support Firefox 57.

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