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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