905816 - Updating a Makefile that links a DLL tries and fails to rebuild all the source files for that DLL

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

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Sorry if this is really a MailNews Core bug; I know jcranmer tries to keep what parts of the comm-central build system we need to have copies of in sync as much as he can, so it's possible that he just hasn't ported something to make this work.

I was trying to use the --enable-incomplete-external-linkage comm-central configure option. It turns out that this is buggy because the smime/build Makefile.in doesn't specify FORCE_SHARED_LIB=1 (I don't know when that broke). I was unable to fix it directly because in the mean time a direct dependency on mime has been introduced, so I thought I would link the smime static library into mail.dll directly.

This of course requires that I modify mailnews/build's Makefile.in, which is fair enough, but then trying to build in mailnews/build causes it to think that all of the mailnews source files need to rebuild because mailnews/build/Makefile is now newer. Not only does this fail because it's trying to use the mailnews/build includes and not the includes for the source files' own Makefile, but the compilation actually creates a bunch of files such as mailnews/build/..basesrcMailNewsDLF.obj when it's trying to make mailnews/build\..\base\src\MailNewsDLF.obj (note the backslashes!)

I don't know whether the backslashes are the cause or just a symptom of the bug.

Comment 1

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All my ..*.obj files are in comm-central folders, so maybe this is just caused by something that needs to be ported from mozilla-central to comm-central.