291916 - Build instructions could be clearer on libIDL requirements

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Malcolm Rowe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: 

Quoting from the unix build requirements at http://www.mozilla.org/build/unix.html:

* libIDL 0.6.3 - 0.6.8
Source snapshots are available from Mozilla via ftp. If using the RPMs, you'll
need both the regular rpm and the -devel rpm.
If you already have ORBit installed, then you do not need to install libIDL as
ORBit bundles libIDL. You may need to install the ORBit-devel package if you use
packages.
Note: libIDL 0.8.x will not work with mozilla.

It appears that this isn't the whole story. After the discussion on IRC (with
timeless, mcsmurf, dmose, bsmedburg), it seems that:

* gtk2 builds require pkg-config to locate the libIDL library. While *some*
packaged (RedHat?) versions of libIDL <= 0.6.8 shipped with a .pc file, the
vanilla source hosted on ftp.mozilla.org (and pointed to in the quote above)
does not create one when installed. GTK2 builds will therefore not work with the
source version of libIDL 0.6.x downloaded from mozilla.org. GTK2 builds
apparently work with libIDL 0.6.x (if the pkg-config test succeeds) and 0.8.x.

* gtk1 builds may only work with libIDL <= 0.6.8.

See also bug 249649 (which this may be a partial duplicate of) and bug 222601.
Partly related: bug 5278.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Malcolm Rowe]

Attachment: An (edited) IRC log

Attaching an (edited) IRC log with our discussion about the problem.

Comment 2

[Kevin Brosnan]

as this is described it is a website bug

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Caillon, help me untangle this please?

Comment 4

[Bastiaan Jacques]

Now that bug 299669 has been fixed, the situation has changed.

The situation now is as follows:

Mozilla (trunk) will now build with libIDL1 (AKA libIDL 0.6.3 - 0.6.8) as well
as libIDL2 (AKA libIDL > 0.6). Any combination of libIDL1/backend (e.g.
libIDL1/gtk2, libIDL2/gtk1, libIDL2/qt, and so on) is legal, although the
combinations libIDL1/gtk1 and libIDL2/gtk2 are preferred.

Note: ORBit will still work instead of having libIDL1 installed.

Comment 5

[Bastiaan Jacques]

*** Bug 249649 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[u115577]

*** Bug 222601 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Fixed during the migration of build docs to devmo.