Unit-Testing Update
Unit testing of the Mozilla toolkit has been making some great progress behind the scenes, as developers look at how their current bugs are going to be tested. I spent the morning looking through...
View ArticlePlans for the Mozilla Build System
Does the Mozilla build system need to change? The build system is impressively flexible and relatively accurate, but it is not especially easy to use or hack, and it can be slow. There are some common...
View ArticleUnified Windows Build Prerequisites
I have put together an initial draft of a unified Mozilla-build package. It is available (temporarily) on my website: mozilla-build.zip (55MB). It contains everything needed to build Mozilla on Windows...
View Articlekillableprocess.py
I’ve managed, at long last, to solve the problem of launching subprocesses from python. I have created a python module which can launch a subprocess, wait for the process with a timeout, and kill that...
View Articletinderclient.py
As promised, I have created a python module which can be used to implement a tinderbox client to report arbitrary. I’ve also created a driver which can pull and build a Mozilla-like application....
View ArticleImproving XPCOM for Mozilla 2
XPCOM technology, based on Microsoft COM, is fundamentally structured around the concept of binary object layouts and stylized calling conventions. XPCOM was a good technique for introducing modularity...
View ArticleSimplifying XPCOM Code Patterns
Code that uses XPCOM is frequently verbose. Take, for instance, the relatively simple act of creating a URI object from a string: var ioservice =...
View ArticleBuilding Mozilla with MSVC8 Express
As part of MozillaBuild, I’ve been testing various combinations of compilers and SDKs. It turns out that it is possible to build Mozilla (trunk) using the Free Microsoft Visual C++ Express download...
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