What if you wanted to build Waterfox from source, but git clone https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox.git --recursive spat out

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
fatal: clone of 'git@github.com:BrowserWorks/l10n.git' into submodule path '/home/maddy/git/Waterfox/waterfox/browser/locales' failed

The build from source instructions don’t mention anything about this.

It looks like I have to have a github account just to get all the source.

@maddy you could change the submodule yourself to use HTTPS instead

@maddy the repo itself is public: https://github.com/BrowserWorks/l10n

@robodoll I’m not super well versed with git and don’t know how to change how it downloads submodules, but I managed to resolve it by adding my machine’s SSH public key to my github account and trying again.

Okay, so I added my machine’s SSH public key to my github account, and that got it working when I tried again.

@maddy You might be able to use git remote set-url (or modify .gitmodules) to change the SSH path to an HTTPS git URL? (Assuming the repository is public)

@maddy if that happened, I would be using maddie's computer and I'd be mad

@maddy oh so what's happening there is it's trying to resolve the submodule, and the submodule uses an ssh URL rather than an https one. you can work around that by hand by not passing --recursive and manually checking out the submodules using https URLs, if you want.

(the assumption there's exactly one authoritative URL for every repo is one of the problems with submodules.... :/)

@maddy @robodoll the URLs are all in .gitmodules and you can clone the repo normally (without –recursive) initially, modify .gitmodules as required, and then download all the submodules with git submodule update --init --recursive

@maddy why is it that so many build from source instructions are like.

1. Clone
2. Run make

Not mentioned, the millions of dependencies you need to install to get it to build.

@bearmine I’ve seen some shit like, “If github actions can build it, then so can you”.

Fantastic instructions. 10/10.