11-12-13

[Note: This post is quite different from those I made in the past. Long story short: Due to time constraints I will hardly ever be able to revive the old SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker style of release updates or even complete the missing ones. That's not too bad, though, since I'm now responsible for the SeaMonkey website, which includes the list of changes per release (of which we have more now, as you know). This allows me to re-focus this blog on what it is actually about: tracking trunk development. The below is probably a good example of what is still to come.]

Welcome back! It's 11-12-13 now (at least in my timezone) and I feel this is the perfect time to share something with you that just landed on trunk.

If you are building SeaMonkey or Thunderbird on Windows, you can now finally replace this:

make -f client.mk

or this:

autoconf-2.13
cd mozilla
autoconf-2.13
cd js/src
autoconf-2.13
mkdir -p $MOZ_OBJDIR
cd $MOZ_OBJDIR
../comm-central/configure
time python -O ../comm-central/mozilla/build/pymake/make.py

by this:

time python -OO mozilla/build/pymake/make.py -f client.mk

and replace this:

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=/e/mozilla-src/comm-central-build

by this:

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=e:/mozilla-src/comm-central-build

and add back this:

mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=-j8

in your .mozconfig and there you'll have it: Parallelized building on Windows, using pymake! On a fast PC like mine (i7) you can get a full debug build done from scratch in only about 25 minutes now, without the fear of experiencing intermittent hangs. :-)

Thanks go to all the people who worked on pymake and especially the ones who fixed the last issue on comm-central (Bug 706905).

BTW: AFAICS the comm-central client.mk is still missing some pymake-related fixes that were recently made to the mozilla-central equivalent, especially Bug 707512 and Bug 643167. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

In the next issue I'm going to talk about compatible-by-default extensions (a.k.a. add-ons) and the implications for SeaMonkey. Stay tuned!