Using pymake to build mozilla on Windows

A number of people, myself included, have had trouble getting pymake to build Mozilla on Windows. Roc discovered the trick to getting it to work: use relative paths in the mozconfig. For example, my mozconfig (which lives in $srcdir/mozconfig) for a debug build is:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-tests

I then build with the commands:

cd $srcdir/objdir
export SHELL; time python -O ../build/pymake/make.py -f ../client.mk -j4

It takes about 26 minutes to build on my Core i7  M620. A normal build is about 50 minutes.

Problems building Firefox with Visual Studio 2005 and Windows 7 SDK

When I tried to update my 1.9.2 tree this morning on my Windows box I quickly discovered that Ben Hearsum had recently updated our build system to require the Windows 7 SDK. However once I installed the new SDK and tried to build (using Visual Studio 2005's compiler), I got the following error:

shell32.lib(shguid.obj) : fatal error LNK1103: debugging information corrupt; recompile module.

This is a compatibility issue between Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 which only occurs when you compile in debug mode. There's a hotifx to resolve this issue. Once I installed this, I could magically build again. Thanks to biesi for pointing out the hotfix!