1140639 - Make is easier to create multilocale build

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Build, defect)

Description

[Gregor Wagner [:gwagner]]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Building#Building_multilocale
is too complicated.

Lets integrate this in the build process.
Maybe something like LANGUAGES=.... make production.
everything should happen behind the scenes.

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

We're having a bit of experience with "behind the scenes" with mozharness for the Fennec builds, and it's not pretty, in particular for engineers.

Turns out that "behind the scenes" often means "you still don't understand what's broken, and no, it just won't work as is".

Comment 2

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

True, we need to make sure that we don't "do magic" behind the scenes. But we could help engineers build a multilocale build.

I imagine it as sth like this:

> LOCALES=ar,fr,it make production

(...)

> [multilocale] Your setup does not specify LOCALE_BASEDIR, using /tmp
> [multilocale] Your setup does not have ar locale, cloning from: http://hg.mozilla.org/gaia-l10n/ar into /tmp/gaia/ar

(...)

The biggest question I'd have about it is if we want to throw away this after building and reclone each time or deal with "Your setup has ar locale that we cloned for you and now it's outdated. Do you want us to update it for you?" and conflicts etc. stuff.

Comment 3

[Gregor Wagner [:gwagner]]

I like the proposal. I dont see any roadblock from automating the steps described in the document and make the most common use-case work. If people want something else, they should go to the document and find out how to do it but having 150 devs look up the instructions and repeating the same steps over and over is not efficient imho.

I dont think we should throw them away. I believe we can automate the outdated check as well and inform the user.

Comment 4

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

I agree except of the "150 devs" part - 150 devs should use pseudolocales to make their code localizable. Using a particular locale is less optimal and may lead to bugs in other locales. We finetune pseudolocales to better cover edge cases (like, text length etc.).

Comment 5

[Staś Małolepszy :stas]

+1 for using pseudolocales for dev purposes.

As far as cloning real l10n repos goes, I suggest we use the /locales directory which was created exactly for this purpose.  See the .gitignore:

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/99bc420ee8edb75f1c5fae06e799b427242cf0e2/locales/.gitignore

I just worry about the multiple branches.  Should we create /locales/2.2, /locales/3.0 etc. and clone from corresponding hg repos?

Comment 6

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on