So for our first lab in our open source we had to create a development enviroment to work on Firefox using our own machines and we were asked to do it on our own. Now being someone who has never worked on a project so big it seemed quite big so I looked for some instructions and conviniently enough firefox provides a link for you.
Firefox Installation Instructions
Let the learning curve begin!
So I decided to get started and went on the lab site and got myself going. I had no idea as to how to use git hub or any of the tools so Ive had to do quite a bit of reading on commands and follow instructions but once i thought of it as a simple command prompt it was quite simple. Ive used repository's before but Ive never used github so it was a little bit of learning there next will be learning how to commit I think. Ive also learned quite a bit about building large projects and that is that unexpected things will happen quite often but as long as you look at forums and ask questions someone will come along and explain why you are having an issue.
New tools? not that many.
Other then the github shell there wasn't really much new tools I had to use, I had to install a lot of SDK's and such but it was not being directly used by me. This surprised me a little since I expected to have like 10 different tools to do this. What was different however was the make files I have used make files before but the projects were generally quite small, this thou was different when i saw how much was generated which gives a lot of perspective.
The hard times encountered.
The only problem Ive had with setting up the development environment and i do mean the only problem, was actually downloading the source. For some reason there is apparently a problem with downloading the source from github on a windows and i have found more people that have had the issue. It doesn't help that I decided to start downloading the Firefox source on the 11'th which is when github servers had problems (I blame work) but the connection issues even after it was fixed were quite bad. It would reach 90% at times and the remote host would be terminated and then you have to start over, not a very pleasant experience.
A solution... not a very surprising one.
So i started to look around for answers maybe there was something wrong with my installation of GIT, maybe i was not using the proper command and i found a whole lot of people discussing it and the answer was generally the same. Keep trying to download until it goes through. Yes that was the answer just keep trying and eventually the download will succeed. And it did after a few hours of attempts, unfortunately GIT does not have any pause/resume functionality which means whenever you fail to download everything is deleted and this was the only way to get started.
All in all I did get a compiled version!, took a while to compile on windows thou link below.
Nightly Screenshot
It was quite fun even with all the problems of getting an installation going.
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