1195628 - First build experience is dreadful

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

I was setting up a new VM with VS2015, and here's what I did:
- install VS2015 (which, BTW, now requires manual selection to have everything needed to build Firefox. I don't remember I had to specifically pick the C++ compiler (!) when installing 2013)
- install mozillabuild
- clone m-c

This is where things started to be really uselessfully painful:
- mach build
  -> failed because mercurial is not configured
- mach mercurial-setup
  -> waits 20 seconds in the extraordinary case the person would want to use a directory other than ~/.mozbuild for something that, months after the directory was added, still stores nothing there.
- mach mercurial-setup
  -> asks way too many questions, some of which even feel redundant with the default configuration we have in mozillabuild
- mach build
  -> finally could start building!

Comment 1

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

(In reply to Mike Hommey [:glandium] from comment #0)
>   -> waits 20 seconds in the extraordinary case the person would want to use
> a directory other than ~/.mozbuild for something that, months after the
> directory was added, still stores nothing there.

Heh, in fact, mach mercurial-setup puts stuff there now...

Comment 2

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

I'd love to do most of this stuff automatically. But user choice and all that.

mach mercurial-setup and the mozbuild directory foo on first run is a bit annoying. Especially the 20s pause.

I'd rather see us move towards a "first run wizard" that handles everything from version control configuration, cloning mozilla-central, and creating a mozconfig.