Axel Hecht Mozilla in Your Language

I’ve been talking with Seth today on how we can answer questions about the status of l10n. My grumpy argument was that I wouldn’t know how to make graphs over time actually show progress, instead of just “failure”. I had two naive graphs, one is showing all missing strings summed up over all locales. That graph would be dominated by the long tail of several dozen locales with a few hundred strings each, and you wouldn’t see a dozen fighting over a few strings each.

The other is what I nick-name “porcupine graph”, show how many locales have no missing strings, vs those that have some missing strings. This is what’s actually implemented on the l10n dashboard as tree progress graphs. But how ever small a string change would be, it goes to all red. And it doesn’t help that one can’t mix green and red color gradients, so the graph usually shows spikes of red and a little black.

Who’d want that as their progress stats, huh?

Now, during the chat with Seth I came up with the idea to just give a little bit of leeway, and accept some missing strings to be OK, at least for some time. I filed bug 582280 on that, and made a rough initial implementation of it. Nothing fancy, just a constant ignored bound of missing strings. Let’s see how the past two weeks of Firefox 4 look now, with just a total of 5 missing strings being OK, ?bound=5:

Now Churchill won over the porcupine, but it’s still pretty red. Which is OK, we haven’t even branched yet, right? So I went ahead and figured I’d add an option hideBad:

Wow, progress. This graph actually looks like our community rocks as much as it does. Gets me grumpy, because this was really just about half an hour of work, plus a few years of thinking.

Now, how do we look on the long run, say, well over half a year? Bumping the bound up to 15, we’re doing like

Pretty good, heh? You can play with it on the dashboard, too. The overall take aways would be:

We have about 20 locales that really track trunk.

We didn’t have that many landings with a high amount of added strings.

I like both :-).

We intend to move from components per locale in the “Mozilla Localizations” product to a matrix of products per locale, and components for each of Firefox, Thunderbird, et al. I’ve created an add-on to set up the products and components and laid out in the newsgroup thread. I wanted to share some screen shots on how things look locally now.

enter_bug.cgi?classification=Mozilla in Your Language looks like this:

Localizers can edit the descriptions on localize.m.o. I’m not totally convinced that the current formatting of the products are great. The double () braces disturb me, both here and on the actual bug form (see below). I might prefer “l10n:ab-CD Language (Region)”.

This is the actual bug entry form, and shows the localized component description. It also shows a rather confusing line wrapping of the product name.

Another aspect that we were concerned about was how it’d look if you changed the product of a bug. Locally, this looks like this now:

Got comments? Please leave them in the original newsgroup thread, or here.

It’s been a while, but I’ll take a stab at what we did to localize Lorentz, i.e., how did we add strings to a stable branch?

The underlying principle was add-on compatibility, that is, language packs that are out there and compatible with 3.6.* needed to continue to work. The second principle was that while we didn’t want to break existing language packs, we did want to offer our localizers to work on the new strings to get the best possible user experience. So we’re adding strings without adding strings.

Given that we had a project branch for Lorentz, the work on the Lorentz branch itself was rather simple, just code like you’d always do. We didn’t do any special branch mechanics there, and built the Lorentz branch against the regular l10n repositories on 1.9.2. The only caveat here was to not remove strings, only additions were OK. As soon as that work got stable in terms of the strings used, we landed a patch that, for each new string, adds a hard-coded fallback to the code. That way, you pick up the localized string without failing if it doesn’t exist. So much for the work on the project branch.

On the stable branch, things are a bit more tricky. Of course we needed to be able to continue shipping security updates from the stable branch, that is, we didn’t want to turn builds red for strings that aren’t really missing. Yet we wanted to signal that the strings are there and to be localized. Up until then, we only had two stages of strings, missing or not. The latter is what we use for handlers in region.properties, for example. We needed a third stage, “report on this string, but don’t fail”. So I added a third stage to the logic around filter.py in compare-locales. This logic is now used in filter.py on the 1.9.2 branch, but not on central. Another necessary addition was to support filter.py for each module, so that we only had to hack around the toolkit strings once, and ont for all apps on 1.9.2. So there’s now a filter.py file for toolkit on 1.9.2, making sure we only report on the lorentz strings in toolkit.

Once that logic was in place, we added a “strings-only” patch to 1.9.2, which had the benefit of exposing the en-US strings in the regular repository that our l10n community is working on.

The outcome today is that out of the 74 languages we ship, only 25 still rely on the en-US fallback strings.

In bullet points, that’d be:

• Do not remove strings, so that newer language packs are compatible with older releases.
• Add strings with en-US fallbacks, so that they can be localized, but don’t error when missing.
• Make filter.py for the module (browser/mail/toolkit) “report” on the new strings, so that localizers see the strings without hiding real errors from non-fatal ones.
• Land strings early on the stable branch to get them exposed to l10n (with filter.py, see above).

The project tree for Lorentz is winding down at various places, and the l10n dashboards make no difference.

The l10n builds off of the projects/firefox-lorentz project tree named “lorentz” have been stopped, and the sign-offs are closed.

Sign-offs for the ongoing work on 3.6.x including the lorentz strings should now go back onto the fx3.6 app version. Sign-offs from the lorentz tree have been migrated to fx3.6 where it made sense to me.