howto build firefox package for development?

[Justin Pryzby]

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 12:45:23PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Mike Hommey writes ("Re: howto build firefox package for development?"):
> > It's always been this way and gets better sometimes, especially when you
> > send patches upstream, which i did recently. I'll have to check on which
> > branch(es) they landed the patch. The patch was for xulrunner, but most
> > of it applies to firefox. I'm not sure I've applied it yet to our
> > firefox.
> 
> Nevertheless, IMO even if the upstream build system is broken and
> can't quickly be fixed, debian/rules should work around the problem by
> cleaning it up.
> 
> I've done that in Ubuntu's firefox (because it makes my life easier,
> amongst other things) and I submitted the diff to the Debian BTS
> (#350616).
> 
> A few days after I filed that, Eric responded to a mail of mine about
> this saying:
> > I'll see if I can tackle this one in tree rather than in the rules
> > file. 
> 
> Obviously with my Ubuntu hat on I would prefer Debian to take my patch
> just because it's less for me to maintain.  With my Debian hat on, I
> don't really have an opinion about firefox specifically but I think in
> general the Debian maintainer is responsible for making
> debian/rules clean work even if the upstream build system is buggy.
Yes .. I see this as a pretty hard requirement.  On the one hand, it
is arguable fine to leave new/changed files behind after a fakeroot
debian/rules clean, but it must always be possible to build the
package multiple times (it is my understanding that this is presently
not possible).  Especially for a huge package like firefox.  I was
actually going to provide a patch, but that didn't work out so well ..

/dev/hda3             6.0G  5.5G  207M  97% /home

Justin