391705 - review policy for language packs

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Policy, defect)

Description

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Language packs can have a simpler review policy for un-sandboxing them, thus we're forking this topic out of bug 375649.

I'd have blocker criteria, and that would be XML parsing errors in opening all menus, all pref-dialog panes, Error console and Add-on manager. My accesskey tester extension could help here. There mustn't be any non-language pack functionality.

Language packs not passing this don't get un-sandboxed, language packs failing the completeness test done by compare-packs [1] get a review text that says so.

As we'd be excluding anything that's not a localization item, I don't see a vector for malicious code.

[1] http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/testing/tests/l10n/scripts

Comment 1

[Oliver Saier]

Sounds good. Should we also require at least one user review, by a native speaker, who'd vouch for the pack not being a raw "Babel Fish" job? I don't believe it's very likely to happen but as for regular extensions are concerned it sometimes does (I know because my parents are using French Fx & Tb).

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Oliver, thanks for the comments.

I'd think that we would welcome comments from native speakers in the discussions, or as reviews. Yet for many languages, it will be hard for native speakers to actually just get through the sandbox and the review queue, so I'd really only want to keep language packs in the sandbox as long as they could actually break the app to the extent that you can't uninstall them again.

If that doesn't work out, we can revise that later, but I'd like to start out with a scheme that gets language packs out of the sandbox quickly.

Comment 3

[Basil Hashem [:baz]]

Marking as complete - we have this policy on http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Editors/ReviewingGuide#Reviewing_Language_Packs