Creating the l10n repackaging system for Fennec
Axel landed a patch that the Fennec team reviewed and approved that will create repacks for Fennec localizations similar to the way we do it for Firefox.
I found an excerpt from joduinn’s blog that is a quick recap of “nightly l10n repacks” and what exactly the Release Engineering team does to build and release the Firefox source code. From John O’Duinn’s blog post “Creating Nightlies a Whole New Way“:
“Every night, we do a full compile and link of the en-US version of Firefox. We then take that en-US version, open it up, replace the locale strings with the strings for a different locale, and rebundle everything back together. This is called a ‘nightly l10n repack’.”
In bug 466570, you can follow just what Axel did to make something similar happen for Fennec. This is a really critical step in the Fennec localization process because we can soon provide visible builds for the localization community members who are making the early effort to translate the mobile browser. Mfinkle closed the bug today. Thanks to mfinkle and luser for reviewing the code and working with Axel to get it right.
This bug is a quick illustration of Axel’s terrific work and his many talents. Within our l10n community, it is quite impressive to have someone like Pike be able to jump from writing code for RelEng l10n makefiles (which enable l10n builds) to helping small localization teams on IRC in places like Sri Lanka debug their translations. Many thanks to Axel for this.
Stas will soon release a productization (web services and protocol handlers) guideline for localizers to review. Ever wonder what we mean by “web services” and “protocol handlers“? Propers to Stas and mfinkle for those two write-ups.
