Building localised Seamonkey web browser
I spent 3 days building Seamonkey on the ARM platform. Each build took between 15 to 18 hours. The first build was actually successful, but I wanted to try making a localised build (en-GB instead of the default en-US) and while doing that I forgot to test the Lightning calendar add-on. When I finally did the test I found that it didn't work, but I reasoned that could be because I had files mixed up between the old and new half-baked compile.So I wiped off and started again; this time with localised build from the beginning. Well, whaddayaknow, this second build failed halfway many times - firstly, it was missing localisation files (but ... but I thought it was part of the source tarball like many other packages!); and then bad localisation files (the web is littered with wrong advice on which localisation tarball to use). The one that seems most accurate is to pull directly from Mercurial repository; this will include the tool to automatically check-out the locale files too --- except that I don't want to build bleeding edge, I want to build a release-build version!
I almost abandoned my localised build when I finally tied up the all the clues and managed to find the location of the correct tarball. So the third build went on smooth, another 18 hours clocked on my little poor ARM box. This one finally built cleanly, I've got the en-GB binary tarball at the end.
The calendar, however, still didn't work. It always said that it isn't compatible with this version of seamonkey, which is odd for the fact it is built together with the rest. For a note, a similar built on x86_64 a while ago worked perfectly. It is definitely not the version numbering as the numbering is correct. Anyway, after spending 3 consecutive days on that stuff the ARM (and myself) is getting tired actually so I'll let that go for the moment - at least I get my en-GB built done!
To make sure that others don't have to spend 3 days building their localised Seamonkeys, I've written the detailed steps of how to do so on my wiki, here. While the instruction is meant for Seamonkey, it is trivial to adapt it to build localised Firefox too.
Enjoy.
Edit - Delete
No comments posted yet.
