Getting comm-central Source Code Using Mercurial

Mercurial is a source-code management tool which allows users to keep track of changes to the source code locally and share their changes with others. The Mozilla project is in transition from using CVS for Mozilla 1.9 development to Mercurial for Mozilla 1.9.1 development and onwards.

Client Settings

The settings are the same as for the core Firefox 3.5/xulrunner 1.9.1 development. See

Mozilla_Source_Code_(Mercurial)#Client_settings.

Getting comm-central source code

Branches

comm-central has various different branches available. Current possibilities are:

• hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ (trunk builds of Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Sunbird)
• hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-1.9.1/ (Thunderbird 3.0, SeaMonkey 2.0, Sunbird 1.0)
• hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-1.9.2/ (Thunderbird 3.1)

For more information on these branches, see the comm-central page.

Initial checkout

The Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Lightning and Sunbird source code is contained in several different repositories. The main integration repository for those applications is comm-central and contains the main code that is required on to of the core Gecko code. It also contains a script, client.py, which is used to get the other code.

To get one of the comm-central repositories ("clone" the repository, using Mercurial terminology), do the following, replacing <location of repository> with one of the http urls from the branches section above, according to what you want to build:

# Pull the Mozilla source to the folder src/ - may take a while 
# as hundreds of megabytes of history is downloaded to .hg
hg clone <location of repository> src

cd src

Update/pull all other needed sources using client.py:

python client.py checkout

client.py performs the following tasks:

• Pulls any new changesets to the comm-central codebase.
• Pulls the mozilla-central codebase into mozilla/
• Pulls the following repositories into mozilla/extensions/ :
  • irc (Chatzilla)
  • inspector (DOM Inspector)
  • venkman (JavaScript Debugger)
• Pulls the LDAP SDK codebase into ldap/sdks/
  • (Except on recent trunk — December 2010 — this is done by CVS and the destination is mozilla/directory/c-sdk instead)
• Runs a hg update after each of the above hg pulls to update the corresponding repository clone's working directory contents. This is not required (in fact, you may prefer to pull manually). Pass --skip-comm to client.py to skip this.

Updating the Repository

To update the repository, just run client.py again:

python client.py checkout

Building

For the comm-central apps, see the following links:

• Simple Thunderbird Build
• Simple SeaMonkey Build
• Simple Sunbird Build

Example

The following script will run the checkout, build and package operations in turn, telling you what it does (and when) and stopping at (and displaying) the first nonzero program exit code. It is written for the bash shell on Linux-i686 and for an object directory set with mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@ but it can be easily adapted for other Mozilla building environments:

#!/bin/bash
# set the following to the actual location of your objdir
# if you want to package an installable archive
export MY_OBJDIR=obj-i686-pc-linux-gnu
date && \
echo 'python client.py checkout' && \
python client.py checkout && \
date && \
echo 'make -f client.mk build' && \
make -f client.mk build && \
test -n "$MY_OBJDIR" -a -d $MY_OBJDIR && \
date && \
echo "make -C $MY_OBJDIR package" && \
make -C $MY_OBJDIR package
echo 'Exit status' $?
date 

Firefox and xulrunner

You can, if needed, build Firefox or xulrunner from this tree. As client.py pulls the mozilla-central repository, builds and development of Firefox and xulrunner can take place within a repository from comm-central. The only difference is that you will need to go into the mozilla/ directory before running the build command:

cd src/mozilla
make -f client.mk build

See Also

• comm-central
• Mercurial
• Mercurial FAQ
• Mozilla_Source_Code_(Mercurial)