Building Firefox/Fennec on Windows

Question

I am trying to follow this tutorial in order to build Fennec (Firefox for Mobile) on Windows (specifically Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, which is 64-bit): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android

I have installed (either because I read are necessary, or software I had before and thought might be relevant):

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional
• Eclipse Helios (not installed, but I have it)
• Android SDK 12 (latest)
• Android NDK r5 (latest)
• Eclipse ADT plug-in
• Cygwin
• Gnu Make
• TortoiseHg
• Mozilla Build (downloaded and extracted, but have not used)

What I did is:

1. Clone source code (hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/)
2. Create a file called mozconfig (no extension) and put the contents as specified in the tutorial, with these paths: C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\android-ndk-r5b-windows\android-ndk-r5b and C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platforms\android-8.
3. Open command line, go to the correct folder and run make -f client.mk.

I received this output:

C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central>make -f client.mk
The system cannot find the path specified.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, uname -s, ...) failed.
'C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/mozilla_central/build/autoconf/mozconfig2client-mk' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
client.mk:141: C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/mozilla_central/.mozconfig.mk: No such file or directory
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh  C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\mozilla_central\build\autoconf\config.guess, ...) failed.
make: *** No rule to make target `C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/mozilla_central/.mozconfig.mk'.  Stop.

This is the first I try to build Firefox and also my first try with make.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

A couple things to mention:

• It looks like the terminal window was opened without admin privileges. Try opening using the "Run as Admin" option. Also remove any object directory created using the failed run. The permissions will be wrongs.
• Make sure the mozconfig you created has full read/write privileges as well
• We only recently (within the last week) got support for NDK5 (and NDK6) working, but the mozconfig on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Fennec/Android is still outdated. A new and improved mzconfig can be found here https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Blassey/Notes/Android#mozconfig (yes, we will move the info to the main wiki page very soon.

After you make the required changes, try to build again.