We need to make the commercial build more flexible. A first attempt to do this requires a --moz-dir=/whatever/mozilla flag so the location of the mozilla build tree won't need to be hard-coded. Also needed (maybe?) would be a --moz-obj-dir=/blahblahblah/objdir so the hard-coded guesswork I originally added to the commercial build can go away.

Well, I have absolutely no access to the commercial tree, but I was planning on having --prefix set the location of DIST. The only problem with this is that some Makefiles assume that DIST == objdir/dist. If at all possible, I'd like to separate what gets installed so that --prefix=/dir points to what a "final" product may look like instead of having all of the intermediate targets intermixed with the "final" product that an end user will look for.

I'm not sure I understand the need for a --prefix flag for mozilla (or for the ns (commercial) tree for that matter). The commercial build is basically just made up of a pre-built mozilla dist (copied into the equivalent place in the ns tree to prevent any damage to the mozilla build), of which a few libraries/components get replaced by commercial versions. The --with-moz-srcs and --with-moz-objs (as I implemented them today) are only needed in the ns tree in order to grab the mozilla dist and to be able to locate individual sources and/or objects that the ns stuff needs. It definitely would be a good idea to come up with a proposal on what the final product ought to install on a system, and where. Right now, I think our (over-) use of the dist/bin directory is very bad idea. I think we should install the few necessary executables in wherever/bin, the libraries and components in wherever/lib, and so on in a manner consistent with other products. Is that what you were getting at?

The ns configure flags are now in place and working: --with-moz-srcs=/whatever/mozilla (not needed if ns and mozilla are siblings) --with-moz-objs=/whatever/mozilla/some_objdir (required if using an objdir) Closing the bug.