This repository contains the code for the Thunderbird XNote++ add-on.
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You can find a build.xml for an Ant build within this directory. In order to configure it, you have to copy the build.properties.ori to build.properties and do the necessary changes.
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If you configure the build process properly, the development cycle is to code, stop Thunderbird, run "ant run" and check for the changes. "ant run" copies the files to an extracted directory in your Thunderbird profile (see build.properties), not the xpi file, deletes the "startupCache" in the profile directory to force Thunderbird to consider the updated resources, and starts Thunderbird.
In some cases, e.g., changes to the HTML of the options dialog, it is sufficient to run "ant deploy" to copy the files to the profile directory and then try to reload the resources in Thunderbird. For the options dialog, this works by closing the add-on settings dialog and reopen it.
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The ant build process creates a "build" directory next to the source directory that will contain the add-on package in an xnote-<version>.xpi file. See the build.xml for details. If you would like to manually install the XPI file, e.g., to test the installation notice, call "ant package" to only build the xpi file but not copy the sources to the TB profile.
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The build process uses JSHint to check for JavaScript errors. In order to get that working, install NodeJS and install JSHint through:
npm install -g jshint -
If you are not yet familiar with Apache Ant, you can download it from https://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi. Ant also requires Java to be installed on your computer. After you extracted the Ant package, it's probably best to add the path to your ANT_HOME/bin directory to your PATH variable so that you can call the "ant" command without its full path.
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There are developer tools included in Thunderbird for debugging - menu is presumably called "Tools" or "Extra" and then "developer tools" (not using the English version).
vim:spelllang=en