289122 - Firefox build instructions not very newbie-friendly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Robin Green]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050328 Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050328 Firefox/1.0.2 Fedora/1.0.2-3

The firefox build instructions make two invalid assumptions:

- that the person building wants to build from CVS (on the contrary, s/he might
want to build from a tarball)
- that the person building knows *which* file in which to insert the lines:
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-debug

One should not assume that a person who wants to build knows anything at all
about software development. That is user-unfriendly.

Because mozilla.org does not provide debug builds any more for their browser, a
person wanting to build, might not be a C++ programmer at all! He or she might
simply want to get a backtrace for a bug report. We should _not_ make it unduly
difficult for such people to get a backtrace. We should be encouraging it!

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
It says: "On the trunk, the default configuration above builds optimized. For a
debug build, add these lines:

ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-debug"

Expected Results:  
It should say: "To produce a debug build, add the following lines to the file
[insert filename here]".

Comment 1

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

That page is gone, replaced with general Build Documentation, which, while not very non-technical-user friendly, is much more clearer.