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Building Spicebird from Source Code

This page describes the steps required to build Spicebird from Source Code.

Build Prerequisites

Spicebird has the same prerequisites as Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird described at

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Build_Documentation#Build_prerequisites.

Get and Prepare the Source Code

  1. Get the Spicebird source code as described in http://www.spicebird.com/en-US/get-source. You will most likely end up having a tarball or a folder with Spicebird source when checked out from the Subversion repository.
  2. If you ended up downloading a tarball, extract it.
    $ tar -xvjf spicebird-beta-0.4.source.tar.bz2

    This would create a folder named 'collab'.

  3. Download the compatible Mozilla source code as described in http://www.spicebird.com/en-US/get-mozilla-source. You will end up having a source tarball or a folder if you checked out the source from Mozilla CVS.
  4. Again, if you ended up downloading a tarball, extract it.
    $ tar -xvjf mozilla_DATE_20071122_0000_PDT.tar.bz2

    This will create a folder named 'mozilla' - which is the Mozilla source directory. Move the extracted Spicebird code (from step 2) to the Mozilla source directory.

    $ mv /path/to/collab /path/to/mozilla
  5. Spicebird sometimes needs a few changes (that have not gone upstream, yet) in the base Mozilla code. Download the patches tarball, if any is listed in the table on http://www.spicebird.com/en-US/get-mozilla-source.
  6. Extract the patches, if any.
    $ tar -xvjf patches_DATE_20071122_0000_PDT.tar.bz2

    Change to the Mozilla source directory and apply them.

    $ cd /path/to/mozilla
$ /path/to/patches/patch.sh

Build the Source Code

  • Create mozconfig 

    echo ". ${topsrcdir}/collab/config/mozconfig" > $HOME/.mozconfig

  • Start compilation 

    $ cd /path/to/mozilla/source 
$ make -f client.mk build

Creating installer

To create an installer, the following line has be to included in mozconfig file,
before the compilation is started. 

$ cat "ac_add_options --enable-static --disable-shared" > $HOME/.mozconfig

 

NOTE:Unless MOZ_OBJDIR is specified, build directory is same as the Mozilla source directory.

After the compilation is done, change to the build directory and build the installer. 

$ cd /path/to/build-dir
$ make -C collab/installer installer

On Linux, this will create a bzipped file at /path/to/build-dir/dist and on Windows, this will create a setup file at /path/to/build-dir/dist/install/sea.

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