L10n:Official Localized Releases

Official Localization

A localized official release means that:

1. Mozilla creates minor updates from CVS together with the en-US minor releases. More...
2. Major upgrades, i.e., the shift from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, is done through contributions of the localization teams. More...
3. The local team strengthens and enlarges the community. More...

Let's detail on these a bit.

Minor Updates

Mozilla Corporation resources handle minor updates, etc and collaborates with you to complete a release. More specifically,

• An approval for change requests is led by Axel
• Code/string/catch ups are also approved by Axel
• Branding changes (e.g., search, RSS, content handlers) are approved by Mic
• Changes to in product web pages are approved by Pascal

Major Upgrades

Major updates are done by you. Our next major update is Firefox 3

• Here are some tools that are likely going to be useful for you in this stage.
• There are occasions when localizers don't meet the ship deadlines, we try to do everything we can to support you to meet the release dates. Mozilla (we) does this by communicating well in advance of deadlines and being clear about module owners and the like. In the case where a deadline is going to be missed, we've considered these as our suggested options:
• next release as acceptable
• special cases we may create a delay on being official build status

Mozilla supports the quality assurance testing of your build

• We're improving automated testing and procedures for human testing to better support this for Firefox 3
• We've also created a 2-week string freeze before the code freeze of the last Beta to ensure you have sufficient time to implement new changes
• And, we've created new tools [Axel help here] to provide nightly builds for which you can test your work against and have more dynamic results

Community Building

Your team should aspire to a "full-skills team". Meaning all the building blocks for supporting your localization. Mozilla is working to develop more ways to support you to develop your building blocks. Check out Seth's blog to hear more about our ideas. We've recently invested more resources to better support your community development efforts. If you feel your team is need of this type of support please email us. We are also working to determine how to assess the "health" of a localization team and how we could better support them to develop their team or their skills.

Back to the Localization Process