The L10n leadup to Firefox 3.5 RC1
Why am I nervous today? It’s that time again. We are in the final hours before the code freeze for Firefox 3.5 RC 1, and we’re biting our nails to see how many locales make the deadline. You see, each time we go through a milestone release, it takes a noticeable amount of coordination and work. The following post describes a bit about what the l10n-drivers do in the lead-up to each release.
During these last hours, to-do items fly around like a pile of leaves caught in a vortex, and the l10n-drivers stick our hands out trying to catch each one and put it to rest. For example…
I just sent out 23 final emails to our localization team leaders who have not translated the final strings that were added shortly after we shipped Firefox 3.5 beta 4. In case you’re wondering, if those 23 volunteer teams are unable to submit their final translations, then we won’t have 75 localizations for RC1.
Axel is tracking all the “opt-ins” for all the locales who are interested in making this release. For those familiar with how revision control systems works, we do not take the last updated Mercurial changeset that is listed on the localizer’s l10n repository. We want to be sure they are not testing or making any other last minute changes. To ensure we have their final approval, we ask them to tell us the specific version to take. I’ve blogged about this roll call in the past.
And, although it is not mandatory, many localizers are updating the corresponding in-product web pages and product pages hosted on our websites. Pascal is managing all of that by trading off sleep.
As I typed this, Staś was trying to follow up with new locales like Romansh, Chilean Spanish, and Sri Lankan Tamil, to see if those teams can finish their productization tasks for this milestone. Why do we make such an effort? The simple answer is that our l10n policy requires that any new locales must spend some amount of time with the release in beta so our localizers can gather feedback from end-users about their translations. During a major release cycle like now, it’s a perfect time for these new locales to ship releases within the official beta process so they don’t have to spend time in beta after we release Firefox 3.5.
Behind the scenes, the entire l10n-drivers team is on IRC answering questions and responding to requests from localizers and others about the release. Axel is also managing that one bug that keeps track of all the locales we intend to ship. And, we are all-hands-on-deck to make sure all goes smoothly.
Finally, mastering timing and communication when trying to coordinate a group of 75 localization teams is difficult, especially when you have moving pieces like the Geolocation strings that hit after last minute. It’s a bit of a new world with Mozilla l10n. Little changes like that one I just linked to are now multiplied by 75 groups who have to update their locales, even if we had already made announcements like, “Strings are frozen, begin translating“. In this specific example, we added two strings after we said go. That was followed up with some apologies and updates on work to be done.
I’m usually the optimist, but I’m not sure we are going to hit our mark for this release, as we have in so many releases in the past. In the end, when we are ready for the release of Firefox 3.5, we should have close to 75 localizations. Between now and then, we’ll be stressing all the way. For RC1…we’ll see what the final count is sometime tomorrow.
Awesome post. The work our localizers do is nothing short of amazing.