Building Firefox 2.0.0.2 on Windows

Building Mozilla products on Windows has become so much easier with the new MozillaBuild 1.0 package.

I did run into a problem, however, building the Firefox 2.0.0.2 source with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (not the express version). During the build, I would get an error dialog saying that the program xpt_link.exe was unable to find msvcr80.dll.

This was because the xpt_link.exe.manifest file was not being copied into the objdir/dist/bin directory when the executable was copied.

The quick and dirty solution:

1. After you get the error, copy xpt_link.exe.manifest from objdir/xpcom/typelib/xpt/tools to objdir/dist/bin.
2. Start the build again using make -f client.mk

The trunk (and maybe the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH also) have a change to build the manifest file in the executable so this shouldn’t be a problem. But for those building from the release source using VC8, this is the easiest way around the problem.

I did a quick google search and didn’t find anything exactly on point, so I figure I write a short post in case anyone else has the same problem.