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Kris
-- 
Krzysztof G. Baranowski - Prezes Klubu Nieszkodliwych Manjaków
"Jakie to ma znaczenie??? Wy wiecie swoje, a my mamy rację..."
http://www.knm.org.pl/              <prezes@manjak.knm.org.pl>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 24 Mar 1998 12:12:38 -0800
From: Ben Gertzfield <che@debian.org>
To: "Krzysztof G. Baranowski" <kgb@manjak.knm.org.pl>
Subject: Re: [Offtopic] Successful Mozilla 5.0 Beta Compile


Wow, what a day. Having the opportunity to visit the Netscape campus
up in Mountain View and be one of the lucky three beta-testers to be
the first non-Netscape employees to build the new, freely available
Mozilla Navigator (yes, that's the official name) 5.0.

And wow, it was fun.

First off, Tara Hernandez, the leader of the build team (she can get
ANYTHING to compile! Really!) picked me up from UC Santa Cruz, where
I'm a student, and we headed up north over the hill to Mountain
View. After we arrived at the Netscape campus (it's a lot bigger than
I'd expected!) she brought me inside a corporately bland Netscape
building, and I set up my Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 box in a cubicle,
immediately getting assaulted (well, not really) by a cameraman and a
gaffer. Yikes! They interviewed me a bit -- it turned out they were
from PBS, doing a documentary on the open-source release.  I answered
as best and as truthfully as I could. Of course, I couldn't help but
say that Microsoft must be getting awfully nervous..

I popped in the lovely fresh-pressed gold CD, and read through the
simple directions (just set some environment variables with odd names
like MOZ_MEDIUM and run make) and untarred the only other file on the
CD, a big ol' honkin' tar of all the Mozilla 5.0b1 source. It finished
whirring after a while, so I decided to first try a compile with
Lesstif (0.83). It took a bit of porting, but after some helpful tips
from the local glibc2/Linux guru, we patched the Mozilla source
(really, Lesstif had the bugs :) and got it to start compiling.  I
noticed that Mozilla doesn't use autoconf/automake/libtool like a lot
of other free software, but its own method of determining which
platform it's on, and compiling from there.  Different, but it worked.

Around then, I turned around to notice a suspicious-looking figure
watching the compile, all dressed in black leather, with hair dyed
blue and grown out black. It *had* to be Jamie Zawinski, and indeed it
was. Jamie and I chatted for a while in front of the cameras, about
things like NPL versus MPL versus GPL versus BSD, and the merits of
GTK+ and Motif.

By this time, the two other beta-builders had arrived -- I can't
recall their names at the moment, but there was a win32 builder and a
mac builder. The win32 guy actually hadn't known he needed to bring
his own box, so some folks had to scrounge around for one for him, and
they fiddled with this and that while the Mac box compiled.

Finally, the build of Mozilla finished up without any errors.
Everyone gathered around, the cameraman and gaffer stuck their
equipment in our faces, and I started up Mozilla 5.0 for the first
time.

AND IT WORKED!

Everyone was ecstatic, and a cheer rose up. I was pretty proud,
although the folks at Netscape really had their work cut out for them
snipping out all the non-licenseable code the past three months!
Lesstif wasn't perfect, of course, and Mozilla crashed after trying
its best to view a few docs about dpkg I had in /usr/doc/. But it was
a wonderful demonstration of the free (COMPLETELY free!) version of
Netscape has progressed, and I'm really happy it worked.

News, mail, and Java were the first big things I noticed that were
missing; no big change there. Table rendering was WAY faster, and
scrolling and resizing the window was much smoother and more pleasant
than the 4.0x series ever was.  There were a few more new features --
a detachable floating Bookmarks menu and so on -- but nothing hugely
different from 4.0.  The cute little spinner (the N graphic with
shooting stars) was gone, and in its place was text that faded in and
out (a tease to all of you out there to create a better one!). There
were definitely beta-quality bugs still to be ironed out; icon
placement on the button bars was way off, text would occasionally
overwrite other text in places, and underlining oddly sometimes turned
into *over*lining, but Mozilla as a whole was pleasantly speedy, and
quite usable.

So after the excitement, I worked on rebuilding Mozilla with proper
Motif (2.1) installed. Again, it was totally a breeze, but this time I
decided to build without optimizations, so the compile took a lot
longer. Everybody decided to go to lunch at this point, and Jamie,
Tara, the testers, and I all chatted about Xena and other random
things over a pretty sub-standard cafeteria meal (well, the sandwich I
made was okay).

We got back, and mysteriously, all our build boxes had vanished into
the ether. Just kidding. :) Both my build and the MacOS build had
finished by this time, and the win32 build was still running into
problems. The mac build started up wonderfully, and although he too
had a few problems with disappearing buttons on the button bars,
Mozilla seemed to be working fine there as well.

My build worked beautifully, much better than Lesstif (unfortunate but
true; I expect there'll be a lot of Lesstif patches quite soon :) and
pretty darned stable. The poor win32 beta tester finally got his
Mozilla to build, but it promptly crashed upon startup.  Whoops!
Things weren't really going well for him.

Things were pretty much wrapping up, I futzed around with the new
Mozilla, figured out that JavaScript still worked but animated GIFs
only cycled one time (still not sure whether that was a feature or a
bug ;) and only crashed Mozilla when I tried a new feature code-named
"Aurora", a sort of bookmarks/search engine/what have you center that
wasn't fully implemented yet.

The day drew to a close, and the win32 builder still hadn't gotten his
build to work. He eventually gave up after a few Netscape employees
tried to fix it, and everyone packed things up. I ended up going home
with a source CD, a neat gray Netscape sweatshirt, and a lot of neat
source and binaries (and screenshots) on my hard drive.
Unfortunately, I had to sign an NDA to participate in the early
compiling, so I can't post any binaries or screenshots. But Jamie can
verify that I visited. Right, Jamie? RIGHT?! :)

All in all, a very satisfying and fun trip. I'm glad I got to
participate in something that very well may turn out to be a momentous
occasion; when I'm rich and famous from all this, I'll remember all
the little people.. *grin*

Here's the specs on my box, if anyone wondered.

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 2.0, kernel 2.0.33
CPU: AMD K6/200
GNU libc 2.0.7
Lesstif 0.83
Motif 2.1

Ben


-- 
Brought to you by the letters I and Y and the number 2.
"You should be glad you don't have diaper rash. Mah Jongg." -- The Critic
Ben Gertzfield <http://www.imsa.edu/~wilwonka/> Finger me for my public
PGP key. I'm on FurryMUCK as Che, and EFNet and YiffNet IRC as Che_Fox.