Firefox:CD Packaging

Reducing the Localization Burden on the CDs

The current Firefox/Thunderbird/Suite CD images ship the self-extracting installer files for each locale. This is a massive waste of space, and means that we cannot include the firefox/thunderbird/suite/etc on one CD.

Instead, we should ship the files on the CD already uncompressed:

CD:\autorun.inf, etc
CD:\firefox1.0.1\win32\setup en-US.exe
  (NOTE: this is not the self-extracting stub program, this is the real setup program).
CD:\firefox1.0.1\win32\setup fr-FR.exe
CD:\firefox1.0.1\win32\config.ini
CD:\firefox1.0.1\win32\en-US.xpi
CD:\firefox1.0.1\win32\fr-FR.xpi etc...

That's all that is necessary for windows; Linux installer uses the same system.

Mac is a little more complicated. Assuming that we ship compressed or uncompressed disk images, I would just recommend shipping all locales in the disk image. This might take a little bit of work in the browser/locales/Makefile.in or the build automation so that we don't "unregister" a locale when we build another one (very simple). The hard part is dealing with the localized search plugins and the default locale pref. I don't know what a mac autorun CD looks like, so I don't know whether we expect users to manually copy the disk image to their hard drive or whether there's an auto-launch program which can help in this department...