l10n repackaging - part 1

My name is Armen Zambrano Gasparnian and I am one of the two release engineering interns with Lukas Blakk. My current project is taking me to research on how the l10n repackages get done (this process generates the l10n builds for all different languages) and make improvements to it

I will describe the situation and some of the problems that we have currently:

• l10n nightlies happen in old dedicated machines instead of running in generic buildslaves. This means if the machine fails, there are no nightlies at all. (Read more about inconveniences of not using generic machines in John O'Duinn's blog)
• l10n nightlies are not been kept in our servers (unless I am mistaken); for each locale the only one build available is the "latest" one (latest-trunk-l10n, latest-Mozilla1.8-l10n) which gets overwritten every night. By being "kept" means that we don't keep the l10n build of a specific day, even though in the tinderbox's log you always get a URL, to grab the file (log, e.g. nightly/2008-05-17-09-trunk-l10n)
• The previous might be a desired effect, since l10n repackages are not computational costly but storing them it is, all you have to do to get an l10n build is ... ... ... ... ... (I am sorry, it is not that straight forward). I have written this past Friday a little script that does some parts of that process for an specific locale, in this case, "af" (--->create locale script<---). The mozconfig used from the source code has an l10n tag (There are 4 tags: l10n, l10n_release, MOZILLA_1_8_l10n, MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH_l10n_release). From running the previous script, I obtain the "af" .dmg file (inside of browser/dist) and the af.xpi (browser/dist/install/mac-xpi), which are the files that I want for a mac
  

One of our first goals is:

• We want to make l10n repacks to happen in such way that can be scalable. Currently it works like this (which is not scalable):
  

1. We do a "make configure"
   
2. Download all locales
   
3. Download from nightly/latest-trunk the latest en-US archive file (Isn't it dangerous to download something that can be overwritten while downloading it??)
4. Do the repack for all locales (~1min per locale)
   
5. After that, we upload all locales

Solutions:

• A better way would be to break this down by 1) creating a locale 2) upload it and 3) announce it. This would allow to do l10n repackaging in parallel which would be a great improvement
• This would also allows to generate "just" one locale if needed. Right now, we have to generate all of them even if we just want one

I don't want to prolong this by explaining how the l10n repackaging works currently but I will do so when we file this week the bug that will cover this project and will allow more discussion

NOTE = Just FYI we do l10n repackages when we have releases in the automation system instead of using the old tinder client machines and is just slightly different by using Bootstrap/Step/Repack.pm

Firefox Release Candidate 1 - Test days

Yes, if you did not know it, you can use the Release Candidate 1 which will be Firefox 3 unless we find any dramatic bug.

This post is just to announce that there is going to be Test days in these coming Fridays starting today.

http://quality.mozilla.org/node/1626

Too late notice but will be a good experience for those who haven't tried yet a Test Day

armenzg: Mozilla internship (week 1)

How to start a blog post to convey so many things that are happening to me?

As many of you know, I am doing an internship with Mozilla Corporation who they deliver to the world an internet browser called Mozilla Firefox. This company is owned by Mozilla Foundation which is a non-profit organization, therefore, the desires of the companies are after creating an open web by being themselves open and allowing the source code they use to generate the browser (I say "the" instead of "their" since the code is owned by no one).

Introduction made, I will center on what I have done in my first week (non technical events)

When I arrived I was received by Gary (originator of Rumbling Edge) the first interim they had this year who came to pick me up with the car and move with me to the Oakwood Aparments in Mountain View (part of San Jose) close to the Mozilla Headquartes (if you look at this map I sit on the second floor exactly around where the RED PIN is)

After that he decided to take me to Mountain Hamilton where the Lick Observatory is. Gary is a person who loves nature and likes to make the people feel welcome, a really interesting person to meet for his unique involvement with the Mozilla Community.

Next day before going to the office, he decided to go and buy a cup for his brother to the "The Company Store" which some of you might know that is in One Infinte Loop (I am sorry Huanlu, you have to take it how it comes) which is part of the Apple's Headquartes. The store looks like a cloth stoe as Zara but with iPhones and iPods instead.

And finally I will be really happy to receive Lukas Blakk (Source Server Symbol) and Cesar Oliveira (Active Directory) who are also Seneca students as me part of Dave Humphrey's open source children. We also have around here, Anthony Hughes (interim of SongBird) which we will be visiting n San Francisco.

I am working in a really cool and heavy into details project under the mentoring of John O'Duinn who is the manager of the release team. He also got a good MacBook Pro for all my hacking and honestly I really appreciate speciall since my laptop is giving too many problems and the humongous screen that they got me is good since my eyes are like my grandma's

Anyways, more to come by the end of the summer... :)