howto build firefox package for development?

[Ian Jackson]

Mike Hommey writes ("Re: howto build firefox package for development?"):
> It's always been this way and gets better sometimes, especially when you
> send patches upstream, which i did recently. I'll have to check on which
> branch(es) they landed the patch. The patch was for xulrunner, but most
> of it applies to firefox. I'm not sure I've applied it yet to our
> firefox.

Nevertheless, IMO even if the upstream build system is broken and
can't quickly be fixed, debian/rules should work around the problem by
cleaning it up.

I've done that in Ubuntu's firefox (because it makes my life easier,
amongst other things) and I submitted the diff to the Debian BTS
(#350616).

A few days after I filed that, Eric responded to a mail of mine about
this saying:
> I'll see if I can tackle this one in tree rather than in the rules
> file. 

Obviously with my Ubuntu hat on I would prefer Debian to take my patch
just because it's less for me to maintain.  With my Debian hat on, I
don't really have an opinion about firefox specifically but I think in
general the Debian maintainer is responsible for making
debian/rules clean work even if the upstream build system is buggy.

Regards,
Ian.