What is it?

After a long time manually downloading Mozilla's source and building it from scratch, I finally decided to write a quick shell script to automate the process. It is nothing big, but it helps. You can use mozbuild to automatically download the latest source tarball from Mozilla's FTP server, extract them to a directory specified in the .mozbuildrc file, build it with the configure options you entered in the .mozbuildopts file, create a distribution in a tarball and, finally, install it in whichever directory you wish that falls in your $PATH. All this can be controlled through the configuration files, a couple of which are provided with the default distribution. They should work on most systems.

Requirements

Well, checking for dependencies is something the script does not do at all. I did try to include some in the SPEC file of the RPMs but you are still pretty much on your own when it comes to this issue. The build process may fail because there is something missing. My script will then attempt to exit gracefully, but you are on your own trying to find out what went wrong. Check Google . It has the answer most of the times. Just enter the error there, hit Search and... voilà! You will for sure need the following libraries: gtk2-devel (or gtk-devel, depending on whether you prefer to compile Mozilla with GTKv1 or GTKv2), and libIDL.

I have tested this mozbuild on Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1, Fedora Core 2, Debian and FreeBSD, and it appears to work fine on all of them.

How to install and configure

To install the RPM packages I provide here, simply download the file to your hard drive, log in as root, and run:
rpm -Uvh [packagename]

Usage

The man page included with the package should be enough to document the usage of the script. Still, the most important options are download to simply download the tarball, compile to extract it and build the binaries, install to package the distribution and install it, and all to perform all those operations in succession.

Caveats

Well, the main caveat has already been mentioned above: mozbuild does not even attempt to check for dependencies that may be needed to build the Mozilla binaries. You must know what you are doing, or at least have a clue. Sorry. :)

Download

Here are the latest files available:

mozbuild-0.8-1.noarch.rpm
mozbuild-0.8-1.src.rpm
mozbuild_0.8-2_all.deb
mozbuild-0.8.tar.gz