246732 - Document the Mozilla build system

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 134478

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

With the modifications to the Mozilla build system, especially cross-compiling
and mingw/cygwin support (i.e. environment vars, configuration utils, */build
and */config directories plus root dir). its hard to make heads or tails of the
buildsystem (for instance, when should nsinstall build, etc?). This impedes
porting, packaging, and 3rd party modifications to the build system. We need
documentation on Mozilla.org, along with better documentation of the makefiles
and configuration files.

Also, with a properly documented buildsystem, people would have more incentive
to work on it to improve it and also make it work with autoconfig 2.5

A requirement for further checkins can be keeping the documentation up to date.

Comment 1

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Comments in the code would be a helpful start.

Comment 2

[cls]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 134478 ***