Hello Folks,
As you may have noticed if you are using the beta versions, there have been a few localization problems in the past. This is not the localizers fault, but rather a problem with our build infrastructure.
I have been working on moving the Lightning builds from their own build machines to building together with Thunderbird. This doesn’t mean that Lightning will be pre-installed with Thunderbird, it just saves time while building since I don’t have to maintain a separate set of build machines.
Unfortunately, since Lightning is just piggybacking the Thunderbird build targets, this causes a dilemma for the localized builds. Before the localization process begins, the language files are downloaded from the mercurial server and updated to the specific version which was signed-off by a Thunderbird localizer. As Lightning can only hook into the build process itself, there is no previous step to update the language files to the version which was signed-off by the Lightning localizers. Adding this step is non-trivial.
In some cases it will magically work, if the Thunderbird localizer signed off a later version than the Lightning localizer, because the Lightning changes will then be contained too. Right now I don’t have a good solution other than to ask localizers to sign off on the Thunderbird dashboard. I’m trying to figure out some alternatives, in the worst case I will have to do the language repackaging manually for Thunderbird 24 / Lightning 2.6.
If you have some experience with Mozilla’s release engineering and have an idea how to solve this, I’m happy to hear it!