Building NSS on Windows

Preamble

NSS stands for ​Network Security Services. NSS is required to use SSL in Pidgin. NSS depends on NSPR and a ​shared database (SQLite since ​NSS 3.12), but you don't have to worry about these, there's and NSS with NSPR package which is compact thus it contains all sources required to build NSS.

Note: at the moment you can't build NSS completely using GCC. It fails at the final stage when linking additional tools. However, you can build all the important libraries successfully. It will hopefully be improved in the future. You can, however, build NSS completely with the Windows Driver Kit, but you'll need the ​NSS-WDK patch (binaries ​here).

Prerequisites

1. Get GNU Patch:
   Download ​Patch from the !GnuWin32 project. Note that Windows thinks that "patch.exe" is a patch for a program and will prompt you to UAC elevate it whenever you use it (see ​this page).
2. Get the Windows SDK:
   Download the ​Windows SDK for Windows 7 SP1 and install it to the default location.
3. Get the Windows Driver Kit (WDK):
   Download the ​WDK for Windows 7 SP1 and install it to the default location.
4. Get the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR):
   Download the latest version of ​NSPR (currently 4.8.9) and extract it to c:\devel\pidgin-devel\win32-dev.
5. Get Network Security Services (NSS):
   Download the latest version of ​NSS (currently 3.12.11 w/ CKBI 1.87) and extract it to the same location.
6. Get MozillaBuild:
   Download the latest version of ​MozillaBuild and install it to c:\devel\mozilla-build.

Apply patches

Download the ​WDK build patch from the ​XChat-WDK project. Open a command prompt at your NSS/NSPR directory and run "c:\path\to\patch.exe" -p1 --binary -i nss-wdk.patch.

Choose build configuration

The two most important options are:

• optimization
• debug RTL

You can toggle them with environmental variables. Here's the matrix:

	USE_DEBUG_RTL=	USE_DEBUG_RTL=1
BUILD_OPT=	WINNT6.1_DBG.OBJ	WINNT6.1_DBG.OBJD
BUILD_OPT=1	WINNT6.1_OPT.OBJ	N/A

The version after WINNT is the version of your current OS (you can check it with the winver command). WINNT6.1 assumes you're building on Windows 7. The default setting is an unoptimized build with the release RTL (WINNT6.1_DBG.OBJ).

WARNING: it seems the builder considers an option to be enabled if it's set, so if you enter set BUILD_OPT=0 you'll get an optimized build, not a debug one. The answer lies in mozilla\security\coreconf\WIN32.mk. They check variables with ifdefs, which is just plain wrong (or they should mention it this way in the documentation).

More info about the build variables can be found on the ​Build instructions page of the Mozilla Developer Central.

Build NSS

To be updated with DDK build instructions

The easiest way to do this with consistent results is to make a build script (the following is what the binary included with Pidgin is built with):

#!/bin/bash

#The path that we've extracted the nss source tarball into
NSS_SRC_DIR=/c/devel/pidgin-devel/win32-dev

#Set our Build Arguments:
#Optimized Build
export BUILD_OPT=1
#Target Windows NT Family
export OS_TARGET=WINNT
#Use GCC (as opposed to VC)
export NS_USE_GCC=1

#Set up the build path with MinGW and Moztools
PATH=/c/devel/pidgin-devel/win32-dev/mingw/bin
PATH=/c/devel/mozilla-build/moztools/bin:$PATH
PATH=/c/devel/mozilla-build/msys/bin:$PATH
export PATH

pushd $NSS_SRC_DIR/nss-3.12.8/mozilla/security/nss
make nss_build_all
popd

Save this script as build.sh. Launch a command prompt and run:

c:\devel\mozilla-build\msys\bin\sh build.sh

The build will likely not complete successfully due to hardcoded library paths and other problems in the build system (it will bail out building .../cmd/bltest). If it gets that far, it has already built the various libraries successfully.

The resulting binaries will be placed in c:\devel\pidgin-devel\win32-dev\nss-3.12.8\mozilla\dist. The contents of private and public are the same across all configurations so they can be distributed separately. The following files need to be distributed with Pidgin:

• libnspr4.dll
• libplds4.dll
• libplc4.dll
• nssutil3.dll
• freebl3.dll
• sqlite3.dll
• softokn3.dll
• nss3.dll
• ssl3.dll
• nssckbi.dll
• softokn3.chk
• freebl3.chk