Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago at 21:56. 1 comment
The roll-out of nightly l10n updates has been…bumpy. The primary user-visible symptom of this has been that nightly updates for en-US have sometimes been delayed by many hours when compared to when they would have been generated previously.
I hesitate to say that these consequences were unforeseen, but rather that we were initially unsure how/if the various systems we use to generate, store and serve updates would even cope when they had to deal with more than one locale.
Continue Reading…
Posted 7 months ago at 17:22. 4 comments
We’ve reached another milestone in our ongoing effort to elevate localized (l10n) builds to first class citizens within the Mozilla release engineering framework.
Last week, Armen flipped the configuration switch to turn on nightly updates for l10n builds on mozilla-central. After a few downtime-related hiccups last week that tanked nightly builds across the board, this morning we were finally able to serve partial updates to l10n nightly users on all platforms.
This is another huge step forward. Nightly testers who use localized builds no longer have to download an entirely new localized browser every day, but can instead rely on the Firefox update service to automatically download a much smaller binary partial update for them. Aside from allowing us to make sure l10n nightly testers are always testing the most recent code and string changes, this may also allow us to recruit a new batch of nightly l10n testers who were previously worried about the bandwidth involved in helping us test on an ongoing basis.
Over the coming weeks we’re hoping to enable l10n nightly updates on the newly-cut 1.92 branch as well. We are dealing with many more builds passing through the staging server to the update generation machinery now, so there’s some housekeeping to be done first to make sure that no builds, mars, or snippets are piling up in dark dusty corners anywhere.
Thanks to Armen for daring to touch the update code at all, to Nick for his update support, and to Axel for his tireless l10n work.
Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:11. 2 comments
What a difference a year makes.
In fact, it was less than a year ago that Armen and John gave this presentation at the Summit in Whistler outlining the then-current problems with the l10n build system as it related to release engineering.
Axel has a new post up about how we’ve been systematically addressing those failings over the last 10 months, and what we’re tackling next.
We’re all about lowering bars to entry into the Mozilla community. I’m thrilled to see our localized Firefox builds approaching parity with the default English (en-US) builds. Not requiring potential localizers to have a complete translation before they can get meaningful feedback, and greatly reducing the turnaround time for that feedback to a few minutes is huge. Taking the stress of generating those builds off of Axel’s shoulders is also a big deal, because it gives him more time to work on other improvements for the l10n community.
There is more work still to do, certainly, but we’re a lot better off than a year ago. Cheers to Aki, Armen, Axel, John, and Seth for their help in getting us this far.
Current Tunes: Beastie Boys - The Sounds of Science | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, l10n
