Using Mozilla Translator

Needs to be addapted for Firefox 3.1 and mercurial, so DO NOT USE YET

Glossary

[user] → is your actual user on Linux: guillermo, father, matt...

[product] → the name of the product you are going to translate: firefox, thunderbird, sunbird, flock, songbird...

[version] → actual version: trunk, 3.0.x, 1.0, 0.x ...

Setting up the enviroment

Install hg (Mercurial), diff (patches) and Meld

Open your distribution package manager and select: "hg", "diff" and "meld". You can skip Meld, but it is a nice merging and diff tool, you may use it in the future. Install them.

sudo apt-get install hg diff meld

(on Ubuntu or Debian)

Install Java

You need to download Java (from here) or install it from your repositories if you are using Linux:

sudo apt-get install java

(for Ubuntu or Debian OS, may vary for other systems)

Directory structure

Create a directory structure like this:

/home/[user]/bin/
                 |run-mt.sh (file, see bellow)
            /MT/
                |mt.jar (file, see bellow)
                |MT.sh (file, see bellow)
                |[product]/[version]/

/[product][version]/

Files and scripts

mt.jar: Download MT (not the sources!) from here. Extract MT5xx.jar to your /home/[user]/MT/ directory. Then, rename it from MT5xx.jar to mt.jar.

And then download [test this file]. Extract in a temp folder (maybe on your desktop for example). And:

run-mt.sh: Copy to /home/[user]/bin/

MT.sh: Copy the file to /home/[user]/MT/

repo-hg.sh: Copy to /home/[user]/bin/

Configuring hg to pull files

You need to configure your environment to work well with your existing ssh key and the new installed hg. You can read Mercurial FAQ on MDC to learn more about hg (the command-line tool for Mercurial), but I'm writing the tips to get working your setup.

Then, you should configure Mercurial before pulling the code. Your Mercurial configuration file (~/.hgrc) should have at least the following settings:

[ui]
username = Your Real Name <user@example.com>
merge = your-merge-program → in our case meld

[diff]
git = 1

[defaults]
diff=-p -U 8

Downloading en-US sources

Once we have prepared our system to get the sources and modify it, we need to pull the en-US sources.

Open a Terminal and go:

cd [product][version]/

For example:

cd firefox31/

Now, we are going to use a nice work that Philippe from Mozilla France did in the first days of hg. He did it because mercurial doesn't allow to download only a few directories (this means that we couldn't check out only the "browser/locales/en-US" dir for example), so if we want the en-US localization, we need to download the whole repository, and for localizers, the 99.99% of these files, are junk for us.

hg clone http://hg.frenchmozilla.fr/

This will create a new directory in (our case) ~/firefox31/ called hg.frenchmozilla.fr. This only contains the en-US locale, which is around 4MB of data, instead of the 250MB only for mozilla-central (and more for comm-central and for future mobile-central).

Downloading ab-CD sources

You need to go to the directory we have created before. So, open a terminal, and in our case:

cd ~/firefox31/

and then, pull out the sources by:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/[locale]/

for example:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/es-ES/