Building thunderbird from the manual no longer appears possible for general users about developer-docs

[jobisoft]

There is already an ongoing rework for the getting started page, but we had to focus our resources on the Thunderbird 102 release, so the rework project got a little left behind. I think we will finish it next week.

[jobisoft]

Are you on trying to build on Windows?

[seanhly]

Sorry, I forgot to mention my OS: no, I'm using Ubuntu, and attempting to install via the mercurial repository. The main issue I'm facing is that I cannot find the install command referred to as ./mach in the developer guides.

[jobisoft]

I will see what I can do.

[jobisoft]

On my Linux, mach is being checked out with the tree. So it is inside of my mozilla-central checkout folder. Not there for you?

[seanhly]

I downloaded the Thunderbird repository via hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/, which doesn't appear to contain ./mach. I checked on an old commit from a few months back, and it wasn't there either, so maybe mach has always been absent from comm-central, and devs have been copying it over from another mozilla-central repository in order to actually build Thunderbird? Maybe mach could also be added to the comm-central repository?

[leftmostcat]

As per https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/getting-started, you'll need the mozilla-central repository in order to build Thunderbird. comm-central does not contain everything that's needed.

[seanhly]

Thanks, that clears things up! My bad. I missed that earlier page containing the information about how to combine the repos into one source directory before building. Maybe the "Getting Started" and "Building Thunderbird" pages could be merged into one, to avoid confusion? I think the "Building Thunderbird" page would ideally contain all the steps necessary to build the software, rather than expecting readers to have arrived at that page from the "Getting Started" page. Just from a UX standpoint, it could avoid confusion. E.g. DDG currently lists the "Building Thunderbird" page ahead of the "Getting Started" page, so a lot of cursory readers could miss the initial cloning advice entirely: