Lessons and Pitfalls in Building Firefox with Tup

Maudoux, Guillaume [UCL] Mens, Kim [UCL]

Build system implementations are surprisingly numerous for the single common purpose of assembling software. With this variety, picking the right one is a complex task. And even more difficult is the migration to a new build system, with uncertain benefits at the end. Software maintainers and release engineers need better comparisons of build systems and precise categorization on which to base an informed decision. As a first step toward that goal, we experimented building Firefox with Tup in replacement of Make. We report here our experience at migrating and comparing the build systems. We also describe interesting features of Tup and we discus Mozilla’s Firefox usage as a benchmark for build systems.