The distcc with MSVC project started last summer and as of today (and the fixing of bug 374563) we are glad to announce that we are able to distribute (non-debug) windows builds of Mozilla. This has been the only thing that has kept us from releasing the beta 01. Since it turns out that the bug is really in Mozilla (well… really in MSVC, but it’s simpler to change Moz’s code than MSVCs) there is no real difference between

This project started in early August ‘06 when Vlad said he wanted distcc to work MSVC. I had heard of distcc being used for gentoo but didn’t think of applying it to Windows and Mozilla. Cesar and I started with some pretty optimistic ideas about how long and hard we’ll be working!

But, with the relase of beta 01, this leg of the journey is coming to a close. We’ve been able to compile moz with distcc and msvc (information is going up on the wiki as I type this).

As always, you can get the source at svn://cdot.senecac.on.ca/distcc/branches/beta01. However this time we’re also offering windows binaries!

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Last Friday, I was invited to participate in a panel at conference on applied research in Colleges held at OISE/UT. I was very glad to participate and give them the “student perspective”, having worked on a number of applied research projects. However, it was a little awkward: I seemed to be the only there with any kind of technical background! It was really weird trying to talk about what I learned and my experiance without really being able to touch on the wonderfully exciting technical things I learned! After all, that’s the cool part.

Speaking to people from the humanities forced me both to speak their language (human?) and think in different terms (!technical). The number one thing that I’ve gained from working on these projects is the confidence of knowing that I can develop software. Working on these projects has also helped me to apply the knowledge I learned in school to actual user needs. Not to mention that it gave me a chance to work with professional developers.

Seneca’s work in open source also means that many of their applied research projects give students a chance to be a part of the Open Source community. I can honestly say that I’ve known (either particpated in or know people who have) almost half a dozen  different applied research projects - all of them have used some kind of open source product as part of their work (either an open source framework, langauge, or major application was part of their work). While not all students and projects throw students into open source culture, the opportunity is there for anyone who wants to be a part of it.

While not everyone can always be a part of applied research projects, every student
can benefit from that kind of experiance. So what can they do?

Open Source is a wonderful opportunity to be part of community of professional developers while at the same time developing technical skills. At Seneca, we run Club Moz a great club where students can get together to work on Open Source projects!

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I haven’t been blogging for a while. This may make it seem like distcc has been stagnant, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

A major thing worth mentioning is that we’re now at alpha 2. You can get this code at svn://cdot.senecac.on.ca/branches/alpha02. We also have a branch that is working on mingw compatibility (available at svn://cdot.senecac.on.ca/branches/mingwcompatible).

I think alpha 2 is probably the most important accomplishment. It has dealt with a whole bunch of issues, mainly centred around dealing with unix/windows path issues. It also added support for cl -I option which didn’t work with unix paths properly (before). However we’ve hit some issues trying to build Mozilla. We are able to distribute the compilation but the linking fails. Let me reiterate that: We are able to distribute the compiles just fine! We have some weird misconfiguration that prevents linking. Cesar (with help) is now testing other apps whether we definitely work.

Our next steps will be:

1. Ensuring that our code definitely works (If we don’t find any real issues with alpha 2 then we’ll move it into beta make a big push to find testers and then release it).
2. MinGW port. MinGW offers a great alternative to Cygwin and we’re going to try to take advantage of that by making the distcc code build under mingw. Right now the mingwcompatible branch is really unstable (won’t build). The big change in this branch will be the use of libtool for linking with winsock.

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Changed my Binary blue scheme after some “criticism” of it. I torn between this them and the black scheme. Hmm…  maybe I’ll make my own scheme? Nah… no time.

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I rarely use the word orgy (sigh) but I feel confident that that I was correct in calling Club Moz’s first hack day an orgy of success. With over 20 people attending we were a little overwhelmed. Luckily Phil, Vanessa, and Ben did a great job getting people introduced to Moz (while I ran around trying to make sure that people were moving in more or less the same direction). We invite everyone to attend our Hack Days and get involved.

One of the issues that we faced is making it possible for everyone to be able to work on code on a relatively large scale. The problem is that, despite everything David has done, our lab machines aren’t a great Moz build environment. (Not that everyone has to work on the Mozilla code directly, there’s lots of great stuff to do in extensions, python, and web dev - these links are just examples of one of each check out the full project list. But I digress…) Step in Ben Smedberg and MozillaBuild which creates a perfectly set up Windows build environment without having to install anything else. While Ben distributes Mozillabuild as an exe (which might have caused problems considering the Byzantine setups that the desktops here have) Dave gave us a zipped copy of it using the “the ultimate networking tool“.

This sounds, and is, great. However, when we tried to checkout the moz tree and build it we hit an error. The file basically said we can’t copy mozilla/config/nsStaticComponents.h to objdir/dist/include (if I remember correctly). Cesar and I poked around the net a bit. We fooled around with umask. We check whether we definitly owned the file/parent dir. We were stumped. Then I suggested we try an idiotic innovative solution of running chmod -R u+r on the source root and objdir. It worked. I don’t know why (I still think that chmod should have failed) but the build seems to be going fine.

Looks like Hack Days will be all right. [Edit: the build did work]

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Naturally, one of the top goals for Cesar and myself has been doing a distributed Windows MSVC build with distcc. Our alpha release which was so good at compiling “simple” apps seems to die on Moz.

The build dies on mozilla/nsprpub/config/now.c . Distcc claims that the compiler died with exit code 2. However distccd’s logs say that cl exited with exit code 0. We’ll be looking into this more closely over the next few days.

For those interested, here is the distcc alpha01 failed moz build log, distccd alpha01 failed moz build log, and the Mozilla Build log for failed build (distcc alpha01) log.

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I’m a incredibly proud to announce that as of now there is a version of distcc which works with Microsoft’s Visual C (and C++) Compiler cl. We’re calling this an alpha release and hoping that people will let us know if there’s anything they need fixed.

To get the alpha all you need to do is download it from svn://cdot.senecac.on.ca/distcc/branches/alpha01. Run ./configure, make, and make install. Remember that cygwin is a prerequisite.

After you have distcc installed (on your client(s) and server(s)) you need to start your daemons. Just run distccd –daemon –allow 1.2.3.4 (or whatever your client’s addresss is). Alternatively you can run distccd with an ip mask to allow multiple clients to connect: distccd –daemon –allow 192.168.0.0/24. This needs to be done on every daemon, or slave, box.

Finally you need to compile something! For distcc to know where the daemons are you need to export an enviornment variable called “DISTCC_CL_HOSTS” and give it the ip addresses of the hosts which can run MSVC jobs seperated by whitespace. When using msvc distcc does not consider the .distcc file at all. From the command line distcc is run like this:

distcc cl /c /Fofileone.obj file.c

Masquerade mode defaults to gcc settings and if you are using an executable name other than “cl” or “cl.exe” than distcc will default gcc. This is done to ensure that no functionality is lost for current users.

Please report any issues to distccbugs@foobartastic.com.

Cesar and I are now going to work on making sure that distcc with msvc works for Mozilla and porting unit tests to ensure that cl users have all the distcc functionality that gcc users do. For details on our plans check http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Distcc_with_MSVC

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I’ve changed the look of the site (again). I got tired of the dark/grey look and wanted something brighter. Thanks to Count Zero for making the wonderful Binary Blue theme.

Now to the untrained eye this theme is just a theme. If one looks closely this theme is not just a theme but is a theme framework. This both really cool and kind of sad.

The really cool part is that this theme does do a lot. It’s ajax based does fancy stuff like inline comments. It also “degrade[s] automatically and gracefully if a visitor with a non-javascript browser visits the blog”. Furthermore this theme comes with full localization support! This really suprised me, esspecially when I installed it and it came out in German! My first thought, due to a healthy obsession with Fawlty Towers, was “I can fix this just nobody mention the war“. I finally thought of reading the readme and it reminded me to set the localization for Wordpress instead of trying to translate the entire theme by hand inside the code. On the other hand it seems kind of pathetic and sad to write an extensible framework on top of another extensible framework (I appreciate the added functionality but… how many extensible frameworks is there room for?).

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