== Building Freenet from source: Short version ==

Install junit 3.

Install ant.

Run ant.

It will tell you what is missing and where to put it.

In particular, you need freenet-ext.jar in lib/freenet/ and bcprov.jar in lib/

You can get both of these jars from a node install, or from https://downloads.freenetproject.org/alpha/

== Building Freenet from source: Using Eclipse etc ==

You may want to use the command line git client, as people have sometimes had problems with the egit plugin for Eclipse.

You will need to manually download the two jars mentioned above, and install junit 3. You may need to add the two jars, and junit 3, to the build path for the project, although the .project might help with this.

== Building Freenet from source: Caveats ==

Don't use build-clean.xml, or call "ant distclean". This will cause problems. In particular it may delete the GWT-generated javascript in src/freenet/clients/http/staticfiles/freenetjs/ . If this happens just checkout that folder again, or do "git reset --hard" to reset the whole project. Note that the generated javascript isn't actually used unless web-pushing is enabled in the config, but it is needed for building Freenet.

== Building Freenet from source: Long version ==

These are instructions on how to rebuild Freenet completely from source.

It is difficult for everyone to build all components, so the default Freenet

source package ships with some pre-compiled binaries. However, this means that

users need to trust that these binaries haven't been compromised.

For the paranoid, we offer the option of building these binaries yourself, so

that this extra trust is not necessary[1]. Unfortunately, this involves more

effort than the default build path; help in easing this would be appreciated.

== Considerations ==

(Properties can be set in override.properties, similar to build.properties)

A. The build scripts need to know where the contrib jars are. By default, they

look in lib/freenet; you can override this by setting `lib.contrib.dir` - see

build.properties for more details. Similarly, you will need to tell build.xml

where the GWT jars are, see the "gjs.lib.jars" variable in build.properties;

you need to put the jars in lib/ and edit override.properties to include

gjs.lib.jars= [ list of jar names for GWT within lib/ ]

B. You may need to install extra Java libraries. These are listed in build.xml,

in the <path> elements. If you already have these installed, but ANT can't find

them, you can try setting the "java.class.dirs.user" property.

B.1. If you're doing a clean-build for security reasons, then you'll want to

clean-build these libraries too. Google's source package for GWT actually uses

many binary components during the build process, which makes a clean-build next

to impossible; however (e.g.) Debian's GWT source package[2] is pure source.

B.2. It's also a good idea to make sure you received the source code correctly.

Most modern package managers (e.g. APT) have signature verification, or you can

try HTTPS (e.g. logged in on googlecode).

C. There is a good deal of native code in freenet-ext.jar that won't be rebuilt

by our automatic build-scripts. You'll need to do this manually; they are: fec,

NativeBigInteger, NativeThread, win_wrapper and wrapper. This is probably the

most tedious step and needs to be done *before* the below command.

== Clean-building ==

The pre-compiled components are freenet-ext.jar (ext) and the GWT-generated

javascript (gjs). The former is a separate package ("contrib"), whereas the

latter is strictly contained within this package.

To use the build scripts, you need to install ant. To compile all of the above

completely from source, the recommended method is to use build-clean.xml:

$ ... # retrieve and build external packages (e.g. contrib)

$ ... # set build properties

$ ant -f build-clean.xml dist

NOTE: the default checkout of this package contains some pre-built javascript;

running `dist` will remove it and re-build it from source. You can also remove

it separately by running the `clean-gjs` target.

[1] However, you still need to trust your compiler and operating system; see

Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

[2] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/gwt

== Verify-build script ==

See README.md in the Maintenance scripts repository. The verify-build script

will check a pre-built binary against the source code, but needs some work to

configure, as you need e.g. to have the same version of javac as it was built

with.

Get it from the maintenance scripts repo:

git clone [email protected]:freenet/scripts.git