Building Thunderbird on OSX
Instead of just waiting for the mozilla folks to apply the addressbook patch I thought I just give it a go myself. Unfortunately I could not apply them to the latest trunk source. But
at least I was able to build the lastest trunk version. Here is how…
First make sure you have all required tools installed. That means Xcode (1.5, 2.x but not 2.0, I’ve use Xcode 2.2) As you can see from the build requirements you can now also build with gcc4 (I’ve used 4.0.1 build 5247). Not sure whether you really need
the 10.4 SDK – but I’ve had mine installed already. Then some other tools and libraries from fink (or darwin ports)
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install orbit
$ sudo apt-get install orbit-dev
$ sudo apt-get install glib
$ sudo apt-get install zip unzip
$ sudo apt-get install pkgconfig
And you are set. Make sure /sw/bin/init.sh is getting “sourced” in your .bashrc (no idea why – just found it in some instructions) and then you can create your mozconfig e.g. via cgi script. Mine looked like this:
# Options for client.mk.
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@
# Options for 'configure' (same as command-line options).
ac_add_options --with-macos-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility
ac_add_options --enable-plaintext-editor-only
save it into the mozilla folder as ‘.mozconfig’. You can find documentation on the build options on the mozilla developer site. Then you need to check out their makefile. It can then be used to checkout and build the application. (On some sites they suggest you to download a source snapshot instead of checking it out via the makefile …but at least for me that totally screwed up my build. CVS worked just fine)
$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot
$ cvs co mozilla/client.mk
$ cd mozilla
$ make -f client.mk checkout
$ make -f client.mk build
After quite a lengthy checkout and even more lengthy build I found the ‘Thunderbird.app’ in the dist directory. Starting it up showed 1.6a1 as version number. Sweeet! :) I’ve contacted the author of the patch and hope to get some insights to get it applied.