Trying to detect Mozilla build ID

This is driving me a bit nuts. It seems to be almost impossible to detect the build ID of a Mozilla application. I'm using latest nightly builds of all Mozilla applications.

If you in Windows rightclick on a Mozilla EXE file and select properties here's what you get:

Using the File Version property:
thunderbird.exe = 0.9
mozilla.exe = 1.8a5: 2004111204
firefox.exe = 1.0
sunbird.exe = 0.2b

Using the Product Version property:
thunderbird.exe = 1.7.5: 2004111206
mozilla.exe = 1.8a5: 2004111204
firefox.exe = Personal
sunbird.exe = Personal

So this doesn't give my any conclusive information. Mozilla.exe is the most consistent with both File Version and Product Version the same. Why Firefox.exe says Personal in a version field I have no idea about.

Then I thought that I might look in the defaults/pref/ directory for a .js file.
firefox.js = pref("app.build_id", "0000000000");
sunbird.js = pref("app.build_id", "0000000000");
all-thunderbird.js = pref("app.build_id", "2004111206");

This time it's also not very consistent. Thunderbird is the only one to have a build id in it. Mozilla Suite doesn't have a file with app.build_id in it since it's not based on the same base as the other 3 Mozilla apps. In Mozilla Suite you need to look for a file called content\global\build.dtd which is located inside the toolkit.jar file.

Why cant we have a consistent why to detect the build ID? And why is the build ID 0000000000 in a release?

2 Comments

I need to detect the build id from an external program. So I cant use the about:config or the about dialog.

Comment by Henrik Gemal at November 13, 2004 11:20 AM | Permalink

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