872888 - Documentation for building Thunderbird unclear

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Mozilla Platform, defect)

Description

[jrl.prime]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31

Steps to reproduce:

Followed documentation for building Thunderbird. Documentation says to type "./mozilla/mach build" and I entered this at the correct directory after everything up to this point was functioning properly as well.


Actual results:

Command line returned:

'.' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.


Expected results:

Something else. Also, there's little immediate help on website to refer users/newcomers to support forums. The Google Group that I did find was for developing Thunderbird (or so it appeared), not for answering noob questions (like mine), and it appears the available options for MDN feedback were to "update the documentation," learn how to use and join IRC chat (perhaps worth it, but it's hard to beat a regular forum), or report an issue on the website, which is not where by problem lies. I think I would like the Mozilla community if I could find it. Also the text below explaining the check box makes absolutely no sense.

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

I suspect the documentation is designed for users building on Mac OS X and/or Linux and isn't properly updated for Windows yet. I will ask about that.

Keep in mind that Thunderbird is now a community-driven project rather than a Mozilla-official one, so its getting a little less writer attention these days.

Comment 2

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

I pretty much a noob at building TB myself, so I can't do much more than point you here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Thunderbird_build#Windows
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2011/11/30/build-thunderbird-faster-on-windows/

And verify that I can build with msvc 2010 express (free)

Comment 3

[Mook (work)]

That error message indicates that you're running the command in cmd.exe without using start-msvc*.bar from MozillaBuild, I think?

jrl.prime: Do you have a link to the specific documentation page you used?

FWIW, https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-builds has its share of introductory questions.

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

My guess is they're looking at:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Thunderbird_build

Which is based on

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Firefox_build

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This has been heavily updated in recent years https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Simple_Thunderbird_build$history so I think we are good