Building All the Major Open-Source Web Browsers

An anonymous reader writes: Cristophe de Dinechin, long-time software developer, has an interesting article on the processes involved in building the major browsers. From the article:

"Mozilla Firefox, Chromium (the open-source variant of Chrome) and WebKit (the basis for Safari) are all great examples of open-source software. The Qt project has a simple webkit-based web browser in their examples. So that's at least four different open-source web browsers to choose from. But what does it take to actually build them? The TL;DR answer is that these are complex pieces of software, each of them with rather idiosyncratic build systems, and that you should consider 100GB of disk space to build all the browsers, a few hours of download, and be prepared to learn lots of new, rather specific tools."

Comments

Easy with Gentoo

[crow]

Of course, if you use a source-based distribution, it's easy, but that's not the point. If you download the source and build it yourself, you'll have to learn a bit about how they manage the build environment. You'll have to handle being sure all the dependencies are installed. You'll have to figure out any configuration options.

That's exactly what people who make distributions do. If you want to see how complicated the build is for any piece of software, just look at how complicated the build scripts are for various distributions. I expect you can find these for the binary distributions. With Gentoo, just look at the ebuild file.

I run Gentoo

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

So it's simply emerge --update world* but I always groan when I see Chromium has a new version, which it does almost weekly, because it takes approximately FOREVER to compile. Firefox and Seamonkey take a long time, sure, but Chromium, yikes, come back tomorrow.

*Actually, it's: emerge -v --deep --newuse --with-bdeps=y --update world 2>&1 | tee update-world-deeper-`date +%F`.log, but that's just me.

Re:I run Gentoo

[morgauxo]

I use Gentoo too. Most things compile in minutes. Some things such as browsers can take hours. Big Desktop environments like KDE/Gnome and also LibreOffice can take over a day each. Some people can't imagine how a Gentoo user can stand it. It's really not a problem though.

The build process never prompts you for anything, all options are chosen before it starts. It also does not require a GUI. (There are GUIs available if you want one) It's just pretty simple commands like (emerge chromium). Emerge handles the whole process, downloading source, compiling, installing and does all the dependencies too.

So... the answer to long build times is easy. Just start the build in a screen session. Then you can close the window and forget about it. It will be done when it is done, feel free to continue using your computer in the mean time. Or, not. You CAN walk away. If you are concerned about the build process running in the background slowing down your computer when you are using it for other things that's no problem either. You can just raise the nice level. It might take longer to finish but you never even have to know that the build is running.

People who do this

[SampleFish]

There are some really great distros that are based on said sources:

Pale Moon is an open source alternative to FireFox:
http://www.palemoon.org/

SRWare Iron is a Chromium project:
http://www.srware.net/en/softw...

Re:Build

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Unfortunately, like too many OSS projects, Mozilla seems to think it will have the only cygwin instance on my system. It therefore assumes it's OK for me to just reconfigure the entire universe according to its preferences, redefine all my paths so the MozillaBuild version of everything takes precedence over anything else that's already installed, and so on.

In reality, I have various other tools installed that bridge the Windows and Linux worlds, including things fundamental to using various version control systems and other everyday needs. As much as I'd like to support Mozilla and be willing to contribute a bit here and there, I'm not going to compromise the development machine I also use to earn my pay cheque just to get their esoteric build system to work.

idiosyncratic is understatement

[Martin Spamer]

Idiosyncratic builds is not limited to just browsers and is probably the biggest problem faced by Open Source projects today.

I use open source tools daily and yet with 20 years development experience I have yet to fine one open source project that straightforward to build.

Re:Building should not be complex.

[abhi_beckert]

If only someone would come along and write a new, unified make system.

This has been done. A thousand times over.

And now we have a thousand unified make systems.

Re: Build

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Maybe, but unless you condone software piracy, that would require either buying a second Windows licence (unless you have one of the SA schemes that covers using Windows as both host and guest OS) or running something like Linux as your guest OS and figuring out the cross-compilation issues (if that's possible).

With today's software and licensing landscape, I just don't think setting up a custom VM for every project you work on is viable, nor that imposing burdens on that kind of level is the way to encourage skilled but casual/irregular contributors to help your project.