Sometimes it’s the little things. Often it’s the little things, I guess.
I like to write cross-platform software. The less I need to worry about
whether I’m building on Mac OS X, Win 32 or Linux, the happier I am.
mozCC was one of the first
projects I developed that had to run on all three platforms, and as
such, I wrote a set of scripts and tools for building and testing the
code base.
During the development of 0.8.0 I transitioned from my original build
script,
make_jar
to a more generic version I developed for
DemoExt,
build.sh,
which was generally a “good thing.” Around the same time I noticed that
building mozCC on Mac OS X didn’t work quite right. OK, it didn’t work
at all. It would appear to build, but installing that build just didn’t
work. Nothing. Nada. No acknowledgment that mozCC was installed at all.
Of course, I was in a hurry to get 0.8.0 out the door, so I turned my
chair, turned on my Linux box, and proceeded to build there. And funny
thing, the builds from Linux worked just fine on Mac OS X.
Today I’m working on fixing a serious bug in mozCC. I’m at OSCON, and
only have my iBook. And I had completely forgotten about the build
problems from 0.8.0. After beating my head against the wall for an hour
yesterday and about an hour this morning, I finally figured it out: it’s
all about the ./ (dot-slash).
Build.sh is a simple shell script that assembles the necessary files for
a Mozilla extension in the appropriate relative locations for the JAR.
To pull out the list of files to zip up into the JAR, it uses the UNIX
utility find. In particular,
find ./content -path './*CVS*' -prune -o -type f -print | grep -v ~
What I found was that on Linux, find returns a list of files with
relative paths and no leading dot-slash. For example,
1926 06-25-104 12:47 content/mozcc/prefs.xul
1560 06-25-104 08:25 content/mozcc/prefsOverlay.xul
2708 06-25-104 12:47 content/mozcc/seamonkey-prefs.xul
.
.
.
Mac OS X (and maybe BSD, I don’t know how deep this goes), on the other
hand, returns files with a leading dot-slash:
1926 06-25-104 12:47 ./content/mozcc/prefs.xul
1560 06-25-104 08:25 ./content/mozcc/prefsOverlay.xul
2708 06-25-104 12:47 ./content/mozcc/seamonkey-prefs.xul
.
.
.
And this breaks Mozilla and the extension. A subtle change to the
find command, namely removing the dot-slash, fixes the problem (at
least on Mac OS X). I’ll have to test it on Linux to make sure it works
in a cross-platform manner, and then I’ll update DemoExt.
Success: the sweet taste of frustration.
date: | 2004-07-27 11:23:15 |
wordpress_id: | 161 |
layout: | post |
slug: | the-importance-of-dot-slash |
comments: | |
category: | development, mozCC |