Adding a new locale to Beta and Release builds

The majority of the work has already been completed when setting up Nightly builds. There are a few prerequisites before adding a new locale to Beta and Release:

  • Localization should have reached a good level of completion, especially for user facing parts of the UI.
  • Localization team has demonstrated a consistent effort, being able to keep up for at least a couple of cycles with the incoming flow of new strings.
  • L10n-drivers have performed testing of the builds on different operative systems without identifying critical issues.
  • There is a relevant number of users on the Nightly channel. This number varies based on the language, for minority languages 10-20 users is a good result. Also, a trend showing growth is important as well.

To track this work, you need to file a bug in Firefox::Build Config (like this example), blocking the original tracking bug for the locale (fx-l10n-LOCALE).

Add locale to build configuration

First of all make sure that your environment is correctly set up, update your local mozilla-unified clone and make sure it’s on the central bookmark:

$ cd ~/mozilla/mercurial/mozilla-unified
$ hg pull -u
$ hg up central

The file to modify is in browser/locales/shipped-locales, open it with your text editor of choice.

$ atom browser/locales/shipped-locales

And add the new locale to the list. With Atom and the Sort Lines package installed, you can press F5 to make sure that the list is in alphabetical order.

After you’ve finished editing the file, check the status of the repository, and the diff. Let’s consider for example the task of adding Urdu (ur).

$ hg status
M browser/locales/shipped-locales

$ hg diff
--- a/browser/locales/shipped-locales
+++ b/browser/locales/shipped-locales
@@ -83,14 +84,13 @@ son
 te
 th
 tr
 uk
+ur
 uz
 vi
 xh
 zh-CN

M in hg status indicates that the file has been modified, + in hg diff that the line has been added. Follow the instructions available in this document to create a patch, submit it for review, and land it.

You also need to set the relnote-firefox flag to ? in the bug, the suggested comment is Suggested for release notes: "Locale added: LANGUAGE_NAME (LOCALE_CODE)".

In order to have builds when the Beta cycle starts, make sure to sign-off the locale on the dashboard (elmo) for central before next merge day, and verify that a sign-off is correctly available on beta before beta1.

Update language pack settings on AMO

The language pack for the new locale will be uploaded automatically by release automation on addons.mozilla.org (starting with the Beta version). A few follow-up manual steps are needed:

  • The Mozilla account needs to be added as author for the language pack.
  • The target_locale field needs to be set for the language pack (via Django admin UI).
  • The locale needs to be defined in this JavaScript file.

For the first two steps, an email needs to be sent to AMO administrators (amo-admins(at)mozilla.org).

These steps will make the language pack available in both the Language Tools page and the API used by Firefox to add new languages from preferences.