541791 - about dialog "about:license" link target shouldn't be localizable

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

The only possible upside is that en-GB and en-US locales can link to different pages, and the downside is that http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-mozilla1.9.2/search?string=licenseLink+&find=aboutDialog.dtd returns instances of it being "localized".

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Hihi.

Introduced in bug 415128, I never get the direction of the dependencies right for follow ups. Trying this way around.

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: rm

On top of the second patch in bug 536336.

Couple of different possible followups, neither one of which need to be part of this bug:

* my preferred followup would be to note that en-GB has shipped both 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 using about:license, and nobody has filed a bug about it, implying that just dropping the whole licen(c|s)e deal is the right thing to do

* Pike's evil suggestion of adding a spell_license_licence entity and triggering "correct"Spelling() from that (which is mostly just evil because of the demonstrated lack of interest in having it spelled that way - beyond that, I don't care as long as I don't have to do it or be cc'ed to it)

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/b020c6b1588d

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: branches: just hardcode about:license

For 1.9.2 and 1.9.1, just orphan the entity by hardcoding href="about:license" in the XUL.

Comment 5

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Why do we want to take this on older branches?

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

It fixes the license link in the about dialog for the locales that broke it, and there's no risk of it breaking anything.

Comment 7

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Additional explanation, existing localizations translated "about:license", literally. Like "Ueber:Lizenz", which isn't a working url. We could try to fix this per locale, or just remove the source of trouble.

This doesn't have l10n impact, it's just not using a string anymore, without any other change that could cause addon-compat issues.

Comment 8

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Yeah, sorry, I had it open to type the risk/reward, and then forgot why it was still open.

Right now, in 3.6 for Bengali (India), Tamil, Oriya, Marathi, and Frisian, and in 3.5 for all those plus Portuguese, if you open the About dialog, there's a totally broken ("the protocol isn't associated with any program" or a Google search for পরিচিতি:লাইসেন্স, depending) link for "Licensing information."

There are three ways to fix that: this way, which makes every shipping locale use what every single working shipping locale is already using, just more directly, with one checkin and one QA verification since it's going the be the same in every locale; by filing bugs on each locale to fix themselves, six bugs and eleven checkins and eleven QA verifications, assuming that there are still active maintainers for all those locales; or by forcing Pike to force-fix all the affected locales, with the subsequent risk of a maintainer who isn't familiar with hg accidentally reverting the only checkin that wasn't by him that he has ever seen, so an infinite number of verifications since every dot release of both 3.6 and 3.5 would require checking that all the affected locales hadn't reverted.

Oh, and if we are still taking updates to locales on either branch, either of the latter two solutions would require that we verify with http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-mozilla1.9.2/search?string=licenseLink+&find=aboutDialog.dtd and http://mxr.mozilla.org/l10n-mozilla1.9.1/search?string=licenseLink+&find=aboutDialog.dtd that nobody else has accidentally "fixed" their untranslated version to a broken translated version, for every dot release.

Risk is, um, that I typoed "about:license" and then failed to actually rebuild when I thought I was testing it and we'll forget to verify before shipping, or, that some risk-loving third party is shipping with their own license that they wrote an about: redirector for, for about:mylicenseinstead, but rather than directly change aboutDialog.xul to their URL or to another entity, they changed the licenseLink entity for every locale they ship. That's not physically impossible, but if there is someone like that, I would dearly love to smoke them out by "breaking" them by showing our license document instead.

Comment 9

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 423398 [details] [diff] [review]
branches: just hardcode about:license

a=beltzner for 1.9.1 and 1.9.2

Comment 10

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.2/rev/8577dbf7f173
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/rev/a8a80ab727e6

Comment 11

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Verified that these changesets landed, see comment#10 for links.