82346 - Make Mozilla buildable with Visual C++ 5.0 (VC5)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Build Config, enhancement)

Description

[Andreas M. "Clarence" Schneider]

Mozilla currently does not build with VC5. I opened this bug to record the
results of my tries to do so, in case somebody else want make Mozilla buildable
with VC5 again.

I'll attach a patch for Mozilla 0.9 that makes it buildable with VC5 (I built
it with VC5/SP3 on Win NT 4/SP6a). You need to set _MSC_VER=1100,
MOZ_NO_ACTIVEX_SUPPORT=1 and either DISABLE_TESTS=1 or NO_MFC=1.

I do not understand completely why it builds with my patch, but doesn't without
it. What I know is this:
- VC5 doesn't know the compiler flag "nowin98"
- VC5 has no OLEACC.H. You can download Microsoft's Active Accessibility SDK at
  http://www.microsoft.com/enable/msaa/download.htm to get it, but it will still
  complain about other libraries being outdated.
- embedding/tests/winEmbed/winEmbed.cpp compiles only with STRICT defined
- CSTR_EQUAL is nowhere defined, although documentation included with VC5 says
  it would be 2.
- xpinstall/wizard/windows/setup/extra.c needs FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT
  defined. I do not know what it is and set it to 0. This causes an if clause to
  be always false.

With my patch you can build Mozilla 0.9 with VC5 and it will run, but it is
unusable because of bug 52219 (resolved wontfix).

I assign this bug to [e-mail] because nobody at mozilla.org will fix
it (see bug 81702). But I'll add the "helpwanted" keyword in case somebody else
want to look at it.

Comment 1

[Andreas M. "Clarence" Schneider]

Attachment: Patch to build Mozilla 0.9 with VC5 (but it won't be usable!)

Comment 2

[Kevin Berkheiser]

Can this be a WONTFIX.  IT would probably be better to support VC 6 and VC 7 
and forget about 5.

Comment 3

[cls]

Last I looked, there were c++ compatibility issues which cause us to not be able
to build with anything older than VC6 SP5.  There's no chance we'll support VC5
ever again.