Question

I am quantitatively studying various metrics associated with automated tests. Chrome seems to have a reasonable set, so I wanted to add it to my data set. I downloaded the Chrome source code and tried to build it with VisualStudio but got several hundred errors–types not defined, identifiers not defined, etc. Has anyone out there succeeded in building Chrome under Windows? Are there tricks I need to know?

Answer 1

From the Chromium dev page:

Compilation failures

Some common things to think about when you have weird compilation failures:

• Make sure you have SP1 for Visual Studio 2005. It’s required. Really.
• Sometimes Visual Studio does the wrong thing when building Chromium and gets stuck on a bogus error. A good indication of this is if it is only failing for one person but others (including the Buildbots) are not complaining. To resolve this, try the following steps:
  • Close Visual Studio.
  • Sync to the tip of tree and ensure there are no conflicts ("svn st" should not show any "C"s in front of files that you’ve changed).
  • If there were conflicts, sync again after resolving them.
  • Manually erase the output directory (chrome\Debug and chrome\Release. Using the command line, you can use "erase /S /Q Debug Release" from the chrome directory to do this, or "rm -rf Debug Release" if you have Unix-like tools installed.
  • Restart Visual Studio and open the Chromium solution.
  • Rebuild the solution.

If it still doesn’t work, repeating this process probably won’t help.

chrome_kjs.sln tempfile problems

If, while building JavaScriptCore, you see errors like:

3>Error in tempfile() using /tmp/dftables-XXXXXXXX.in: Parent directory (/tmp/) is not writable 3> at /cygdrive/c/b/slave/WEBKIT~1/build/webkit/third_party/JavaScriptCore/pcre/dftables line 236 3>make: *** [chartables.c] Error 255 

…it’s because the Cygwin installation included in the Chromium source is having trouble mapping the NT ACL to POSIX permissions. This seems to happen when Chromium is checked out into a directory for which Cygwin can’t figure out the permissions in the first place, possibly when the directory is created from within a Cygwin environment before running mkpasswd. Cygwin then imposes its own access control, which is incorrectly restrictive. As a workaround, do one of the following:

• Edit the NT permissions on third_party\cygwin\tmp to allow Modify and Write actions for Everyone and machine\Users. Cygwin is able to figure this out. Or,

• Figure out what went wrong with your checkout and try again – try doing the checkout from cmd instead of from a Cygwin shell, then verify that the permissions aren’t completely blank in your Cygwin installation. Or,

• Bypass Cygwin’s access control (NT’s will still be in effect) by editing webkit\build\JavaScriptCore\prebuild.bat and webkit\build\WebCore\prebuild.bat to include the following line before invoking anything that uses Cygwin:

       set CYGWIN=nontsec 

Only one of these solutions should be needed.