Localization prerequisites

To work on localization, you need a subset of the Mozilla Build Prerequisites. On Mac and Linux, you should be just fine, and on Windows, MozillaBuild should get you everything you need.

Tools

  • A recent POSIX Shell
  • Python 2.5 or newer.
  • Perl 5.6 or higher Older perl versions may work if you upgrade File::Spec to version 0.8
  • GNU make 3.79.1 or higher. Other varieties of "make" will not work.
  • autoconf-2.13 - Autoconf 2.5x will not work.
  • zip 2.3 (or higher)
  • Mercurial 1.2 or higher recommended. Needed for development of Firefox 3.5/SeaMonkey 2.0/Thunderbird 3.0 and later.
  • A text editor. You can try one of these:

To verify that they work, open a shell. Linux users should know, on the Mac, you find Terminal in Applications/Utilities. On Windows, MozillaBuild offers a start-shell-l10n.bat in c:\mozilla-build. Let’s try our entry points:

$  hg --version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 1.3.1)
Copyright (C) 2005-2009 Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com> and others
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE

Great, hg works.

$ make –version
GNU Make 3.81.90
…

make works, too. Don’t bother the version string here, as long as you’re 3.79.1 or better. Now continue the scheme for python and perl, and try zip -h, too.

Document Tags and Contributors

 Contributors to this page: teoli, emorley, Sipaq, Sheppy, stasm, Jürgen Jeka, AxelHecht, Standard8, BenoitL
 Last updated by: teoli,