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Comment by ivanstojic | Hacker News Reader

Back in ~2015, there were several Firefox developers who visited a local hacklab where I used to hang out. I was aware of a bug in the current version of FX at that time, and I knew how to fix it. I wanted to get their help to create a patch for the bug and get it submitted.

After about two hours of trying, we were unable to produce a working build from a tagged release point in their version control - even before applying any changes.

I'm hoping the new tooling works better.

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I'm sorry you had this experience.

I'm also happy to say that we actually did improve our build chain. I have a build env for Firefox on Mac, Windows and Linux and it all works quite smoothly. The only issue is that full compilation takes time (30 minutes on my laptop).

Fortunately we also now have Artifact Builds which allow you to hack on the front-end JS code without having to rebuild the C++ backend [0].

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

You should download the code today and try to build.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

It's just a ./mach build after checking out the code and running the bootstrap script.

I'm curious: Which operating system?

The Linux x86_64 build experience has worked very well on Ubuntu for many years. These days you don't even need to copy and paste the apt incantations: ./mach bootstrap takes care of that.

It was on a Mac, which I admit probably isn't where the core of development lies.

Oddly my impression is that their focus is more on Mac and Windows than on Linux. I swear that whenever i see them presenting something, it is invariably done using a Mac.

Many gecko/firefox devs work on Macs, so it is very surprising to hear that, unless your are running a somewhat old and unsupported version of MacOS (you need 10.7 according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...).

one of firefox engineers is working on https://janitor.technology, which allows to build firefox in an online ide

Had a similar experience trying to debug some UI problems I was facing a few years ago. Building and contributing to Chromium is a breeze, in comparison, that is as long as you have a steady and fast Internet connection.

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