L10n:Official Localized Releases
Official Localization
A localized official release means that:
- Mozilla creates minor updates from CVS together with the en-US minor releases. Details...
- Major upgrades, i.e., the shift from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, is done through contributions of the localization teams. Details...
- The local team strengthens and enlarges the community. Details...
Following is more detail...
Minor Updates
Mozilla Corporation resources handle minor updates, etc and collaborates with you to complete a release. Minor updates are generated from a stable branch, this means, changes to that branch require approval and are tightly controlled on testing. This helps us to make sure that there are no regressions in minor updates. The corresponding tree rules are mentioned on the l10n branch tinderbox and announced in the .l10n newsgroup. All changes are documented in bugs, filed by the localizer in their Bugzilla component.
More specifically,
- Patches are approved after technical review by Axel
- Branding changes (e.g., search, RSS, content handlers) are approved by Mic
- Changes to in-product web pages are managed by Pascal
Major Upgrades
Major updates are done by you. Our next major update is Firefox 3
- There are some tools that are likely useful for you in this stage.
- On the occasions when you don't meet the ship deadlines, we try to do everything we can to support you to meet the release dates. We do 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 our automated testing capabilities and our procedures for human testing, to better support you for Firefox 3
- For major upgrades (Firefox 3), we've 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 testing tools to provide nightly builds for which you can test your work against and have more dynamic results
Community Building
Your team should aspire to have 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