1687908 - Can no longer run mach bootstrap to build Firefox from archives

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1798746

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

People are reporting (and there was a similar report on matrix) that building from archives no longer works. It looks like this was broken in bug 1662893. That bug doesn't seem to be aware that we advise people to use these archives ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Source_Code/Downloading_Source_Archives , "If you are just starting out or you want to build a particular Mozilla product release, downloading a source archive is recommended.").

We also have docs that suggest downloading only boostrap.py and using it to ensure pre-requisites for building and the checkout are in place, cf. https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.html#getting-started , and based on the prose in bug 1662893 it sounds like that might have broken, too?

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #0)

We also have docs that suggest downloading only boostrap.py and using it to ensure pre-requisites for building and the checkout are in place, cf. https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/linux_build.html#getting-started , and based on the prose in bug 1662893 it sounds like that might have broken, too?

Oh, hm, maybe not, because of bug 1647792?

Comment 2

[Mitchell Hentges [:mhentges] 🦀]

We've got to tweak our "quickstart docs" a bit, because they're out of date - that's in the work queue here :)
./mach bootstrap now only runs from within a VCS checkout. At the moment, if developers want to build from a tarball, they need to install Firefox's dependencies manually. This is because we do some history checking when deciding which artifacts to download.

Let's leave this ticket open, because we could make that "history checking" optional, and potentially still bootstrap from non-VCS environments? There'd be some research needed though, because I'm not sure how long our "artifacts" remain on Taskcluster before expiring, and there could be a usage of hg/git that I'm forgetting here.

Related: confusingly, there's two things that are "bootstrap":

• ./mach bootstrap (installs dependencies and sets up the machine for dev)
• The "standalone bootstrap script" (independently clones the repository and runs ./mach bootstrap)

Comment 3

[Alex Hochheiden [:ahochheiden] [he/him]]

As far as I can tell the docs have been updated since this was raised to no longer recommend the source checkout as the default path.

The changes in bug 1798746 should allow ./mach bootstrap to work again from source.

Since there's nothing left to do here, I will be closing this bug as a duplicate.