I’ve split comments from the main article on compiling Firefox or Thunderbird using the free MS Visual C++ Toolkit to make it more readable and usable. I’m keeping the most recent comments on this page, and I’ll periodically move older comments elsewhere as the instructions change and comments become less relevant. This page will always contain the most recent comments; links to archived comments will be found immediately below this paragraph as I create them.
I plan to move all current comments to a separate archive page when I next fully update the instructions to the latest Mozilla source code and MS toolchain and SDK, which should be around Christmas.
I spent about half a day to set up build environments for both 1.8.1 branch and 1.9 trunk on my Win 2k box. The former needs either VC6 or VC7.x while the latter needs VC 7.x or VC8. Because VC6 only works with Feb 2003 edition of PSDK which cannot be installed side by side with the latest PSDK apparently required by VC8 express. I decided to use VC 7 toolkit 2003 for 1.8 branch and VC8 express for trunk. VC8 express part was easy, but VC7 toolkit part was harder. Anyway, thanks to this and other pages, I was able to build both 1.8 and trunk. It might have been easier if I had installed MASM, but I didn’t and had to track down a couple of files, cvtres.exe and lib.exe. I found both cvtres.exe and lib.exe in \Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\Bin\win64\x86\AMD (it could be just %PSDKROOT%\Bin\win64, but in my case, it’s in x86/AMD). I confirmed that this lib.exe for 64bit works fine when used to build a 32bit library. It’s also reported that the same is true of cvtres.exe. (for instance, see [http://tinyurl.com/ftqfb here]). However, I picked it up from \WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 (.Net Runtime)
Comment by J. Shin — 26.02.06 @ 01:38