Hunting the Shmoo

Mozilla developers often need to juggle multiple build configurations in their day to day work. Strategies to manage this sometimes include complex shell scripting built into their mozconfig, or a topsrcdir littered with mozconfig-* files and then calls to the build system like MOZCONFIG=mozconfig-debug ./mach build. But there’s another method (which is basically just a variant on the latter), that might help make managing mozconfigs a teensy bit easier: mozconfigwrapper.

In the interest of not documenting things in blog posts (and because I’m short on time this morning), I invite you to read the README file of the repo for installation and usage instructions. Please file issues and don’t hesitate to reach out if the README is not clear or you have any problems.

Mach is an amazing tool which facilitates a large number of common user stories in the mozilla source tree. You can perform initial setup, execute a build, run tests, examine diagnostics, even search Google. Many of these things require an object directory. This can potentially lead to some confusion if you typically have more than one object directory at any given time. How does mach know which object directory to operate on?

Mozconfigwrapper is a tool inspired by Doug Hellman’s magnificent virtualenvwrapper. In a nutshell, mozconfigwrapper hides all of your mozconfigs into a configurable directory (defaults to ~/.mozconfigs), and lets you easily switch, create, remove, edit and list them. Mozconfigwrapper is Unix only for now.