Monday, July 21, 2008

Building Mozilla Weave on FreeBSD

Mozilla Lab's Weave project provides bookmark and user data synchronisation between browsers. It's very useful, but doesn't currently support FreeBSD. Since I run Firefox 3.0 on FreeBSD, this is a little irritating to me ;) So, following the hints on Weave's wiki, I attempted to build Weave on my BSD box.

The script I came up with is a nasty hack. There *must* be a cleaner way to do this. Nevertheless, it successfully builds Weave 0.2.5 on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE against the Firefox 3.0.1 sources.

To build Weave, you'll need a working ports system that's reasonably up-to-date (has www/firefox3). You'll also need gmake and python installed.

Download the latest Weave sources and untar them. Then copy my script into the top-level source directory (weave-c8bce0724360 at time of writing). cd into this directory, and run the buildweave.sh script. You'll be left with an XPI installer ready to install.

For those who're lazy, here's my pre-compiled version of Weave 0.2.5 for FreeBSD 7.0.

UPDATE 2008/08/10: Weave 0.2.6 released
Weave's been updated, so here's a pre-compiled version of 0.2.6.

UPDATE 2008/10/20: Weave 0.2.7 released
Weave's been updated, so here's a pre-compiled version of 0.2.7.

posted by guy at: 18:22 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link