303379 - likelyTimezone is unfriendly to L10n

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: Internal Components, defect)

Description

[Robert Kaiser]

Bug 301624 added a likelyTimezone string to calendar.properties which is hard
for localizers to check and translate because of it containing a cryptic date part.
If it was "America/New_York" alone, it would already be much easier, though I
expect to see some localizers translating the mere string instead of actually
localizing it (we already had that with "true" and similar stuff, even "height:
Xem; width: Yem;" got literally translated sometimes) - so don't hardly depend
on a reasonable value there...

Most of the people and localizers have read their timezone ID in the form
<continent>/<city> somewhere though, partly also in other software, so they know
it most of the time (I would have known Europe/Vienna, but when seeing that
date, I wondered).
Additionally, pointing to the C file might be correct from a code point of view,
but most localizers are no coders, so a normal text or HTML file at some public
URL would be more helpful to them.

As a side note, adding L10n notes in the form we generally use in Mozilla source
might help L10n tools that are able to read them and display them in a nice form
(not that our main L10n tool, MozillaTranslator, unfortunately completely
ignores them at the moment). See
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/toolkit/locales/en-US/chrome/global/contentAreaCommands.properties#14
for the usual style of such comments.

Comment 1

[Joey Minta]

Attachment: patch v1

Timezone guessing will now be supported in both the long/hard-to-figure-out format and the shorter/easier Olson-timezone name.  I've also updated the style of the l10n note in line with the suggestion in comment #0.  If a translator messes this up, it's not that bug of a deal.  The try/catch block will hide the mistake and the guessing algorithm will move on to its next option.

kairo: I'm not looking for code review here, but just a confirmation of whether this is reasonable enough for translators.

mvl: please do code review

Comment 2

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

Comment on attachment 204248 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

looks good, but should add a comment that the timezone identifier should be in english, not the language of the translation.
r=mvl with that.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

Comment on attachment 204248 [details] [diff] [review]
patch v1

Looks good to me, if you fulfill mvl's additional request in that comment :)

Comment 4

[Joey Minta]

patch checked in