1446946 - Firefox build issue ERROR: Cannot find the target C compiler on Windows

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[4Kez]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.186 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

i was trying to build firefox using: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Windows_Prerequisites
when i reached to the ./mach build i faced the issue below


Actual results:

$ ./mach build
 0:04.13 Clobber not needed.
 0:04.16 Adding make options from None
    MOZ_OBJDIR=c:/mozilla-source/mozilla-central/obj-i686-pc-mi
    OBJDIR=c:/mozilla-source/mozilla-central/obj-i686-pc-mingw3
 0:04.39 c:\mozilla-build\mozmake\mozmake.EXE -f client.mk -s c
 0:05.19 cd c:/mozilla-source/mozilla-central/obj-i686-pc-mingw
 0:05.31 c:/mozilla-source/mozilla-central/configure
 0:06.88 Reexecuting in the virtualenv
 0:07.51 checking for vcs source checkout... hg
 0:08.13 checking for a shell... C:/mozilla-build/msys/bin/sh.e
 0:10.65 checking for host system type... i686-pc-mingw32
 0:10.65 checking for target system type... i686-pc-mingw32
 0:10.78 checking for a shell... C:/mozilla-build/msys/bin/sh.e
 0:12.81 checking for host system type... i686-pc-mingw32
 0:12.81 checking for target system type... i686-pc-mingw32
 0:13.09 checking for vcs source checkout... hg
 0:13.09 checking whether cross compiling... no
 0:13.35 checking for the target C compiler... not found
 0:13.38 DEBUG: _cc: Trying cl
 0:13.38 DEBUG: _cc: Trying clang-cl
 0:13.38 DEBUG: _cc: Trying gcc
 0:13.38 DEBUG: _cc: Trying clang
 0:13.38 ERROR: Cannot find the target C compiler
 0:14.30 *** Fix above errors and then restart with\
 0:14.30                "c:/mozilla-build/mozmake/mozmake.EXE -
"
 0:14.33 mozmake.EXE: *** [client.mk:149: configure] Error 1

Comment 1

[Cosmin Muntean [:cmuntean], Ecosystem QA]

Unfortunately I am not an expert in building Firefox, but I am assigning a component to this issue in order to involve the development team and get an opinion on this.

Comment 2

[Kim Moir [:kmoir] ET]

Did you install Visual Studio 2017 as per the instructions here?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Windows_Prerequisites

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I have the same problem. I'm the Thunderbird maintainer and I have three working development machines.

Now I ran into the problem, since I want to set up the fourth machine a little different from the others, that is the source code is not stored on C:\ this time, in fact my drive is called M:\, and I'm setting my home to "M:\mozilla-source". It's always worked for me with home set to C:\mozilla-source.

The error message given by the script is pretty poor, it doesn't give any indication whether it's looking for the cl.exe from VS2017 in
  C:\vs2017\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.13.26128\bin\Hostx64\x64\cl.exe
or perhaps 
  C:\mozilla-source\.mozbuild\clang\msbuild-bin\cl.exe
which on the failing machine is in M:\mozilla-source\.mozbuild\clang\msbuild-bin\cl.exe. That's the one that comes through LLVM.

BTW, the LLVM magic in start-shell.bat has no effect since HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\LLVM\LLVM isn't present.

So which cl.exe is it trying to find, which path is it looking at and what can be done to diagnose and fix the problem?

Comment 4

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Frank-Rainer Grahl pointed me to vswhere.exe. Run on a good machine, it returns heaps of useful output, run on the "bad" machine there was no output.

I started the VS installer again and it told me that there was a restart pending. I feel like a complete fool now since it wanted to restart after the installation and I chose later an then forgot :-(

Comment 5

[Intermittent Failures Robot]

1 failures in 655 pushes (0.002 failures/push) were associated with this bug in the last 7 days.    

Repository breakdown:
* autoland: 1

Platform breakdown:
* linux64: 1

For more details, see:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/intermittent-failures.html#/bugdetails?bug=1446946&startday=2018-05-28&endday=2018-06-03&tree=trunk

Comment 6

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Jorg, do you still see that?
thanks

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

As per comment #4, when I set up the machine in question, I ignored a necessary restart. After that restart, all became good.

Comment 8

[Kim Moir [:kmoir] ET]

closing, user fixed issue.