455127 - Thunderbird development instructions are wrong

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Florian Hars]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 

If you follow the instructions on how to build thunderbird on www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/ you end up downloading hundreds of megabytes of stuff that does not contain any thunderbird source.

And since the repositories on hg.mozilla.org aren't even related, you cannot change to the correct branch without redownloading the shared stuff.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
2. Click on "Downloading Thunderbird Source Code"
3. Follow the instructions
Actual Results:  
You get a clone of http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

Expected Results:  
You get a clone of http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/

In addidtion, there is no component (at least that I can find) to report errors in the website.

In addition, I found it almost impossible to search for already reported bugs, since the search function on the submit page seems to serch for bugs that contain any of the search keywords for any of the components.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> If you follow the instructions on how to build thunderbird on
> www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/ you end up downloading hundreds of
> megabytes of stuff that does not contain any thunderbird source.

Thank you for reporting this, our instructions are still quite young as we haven't been using Mercuiral long, and I didn't realise there was a pointer from that page.

I've fixed developer.mozilla.org to provider pointers to the right pages for those wishing to develop Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

> And since the repositories on hg.mozilla.org aren't even related, you cannot
> change to the correct branch without redownloading the shared stuff.

I've also added a note that if you have a mozilla-central source repository you can move it into underneath the comm-central repository before running client.py.

> In addidtion, there is no component (at least that I can find) to report errors
> in the website.

Developer.mozilla.org is a set of wiki pages that anyone can edit/comment on. There is a Mozilla Developer Center product (under "Other Products") that has a Documentation requests section, or there is a www.mozilla.org product that could be used.

> In addition, I found it almost impossible to search for already reported bugs,
> since the search function on the submit page seems to serch for bugs that
> contain any of the search keywords for any of the components.

If you used the advanced search page (click on the link near the top of the page), you have much more control over your search parameters.