• Fennec at FOSDEM and adding your localization to the process

    February 8th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Today at FOSDEM, I watched Mark Finkle and Christian Sejersen present on Mozilla’s Fennec browser.  It was probably my favorite presentation for a few reasons.  Among many other things, Christian showed a slide from his presentation last year that detailed all the hopeful goals for his team.  His next slide showed the progress we’ve made 1 year later.  Mark Finkle also gave a very detailed presentation he called “Fennec – The Inside Story“.  It’s worth taking a look at that presentation when he gets it online.

    After the presentation, a few localizers asked me about how to get involved in localizing.  If you’re interested, please add your locale code to the whiteboard section of this bug.

    FOSDEM is wrapping up.  It was another great conference and I thought Mark Surman gave a terrific keynote.  It was also good to see the Mozilla room packed for almost the entire time.

  • Creating the l10n repackaging system for Fennec

    January 27th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    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.

  • Fennec Localization Plan

    January 26th, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    The L10n-drivers team has sketched out the beginnings of a localization plan for the Fennec mobile browser.  We have formed an experimental testing group of the teams who have gotten an early start.  This group will work directly with both the Fennec developers to report bugs and the l10n-drivers to get localizations ready for the upcoming beta release.  If you would like to become part of this early group, please let me know.

    Also, I thought I would let you know who from the l10n-drivers team will be guiding different aspects of the process:

    • Axel (Pike on IRC) will be in charge of all the build and release engineering related to Fennec.  He recently landed a large patch that will enable Fennec builds.  Within the coming days and weeks, Pike will have Fennec builds visible on the L10n dashboard.
    • Stas (Stas on IRC) will be leading the web services and productization, working closely with localizers and the UI developers on Fennec.  He will soon release a productization guideline for localizers via his blog and posts to the L10n newsgroup.
    • Gandalf (Gandalf on IRC) will be the main point of contact for all questions on how to localize Fennec.  He has already localized the browser using an emulator on his machine.  He can walk you through any technical pain points you might face as you localize.  He also will show you to set up the proper file structure in http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/[your_locale]

    This quarter, it is likely that an alpha or beta or some combination of both will be released.  Please let us know if you’d like to get started and we will include you in the early test group.