Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Firefox in Armenian: what comes next and where you could help

Hi all,
As some of you know we are trying to make Armenian an official language for Firefox.

So far we have got to the point that we have a language package to change Firefox into Armenian and I am trying to make us an official registered team. That should get us access into the Mozilla systems and open many services to provide us feedback on which state the language is.

If you don't want to help or get involved you can pass the link to the language package to your friends and ask them to try it and/or pass it on. You can also think of people who might want to help us. If you want to see what this is about please keep on reading.

While we wait to be registered as an official language there are several places where I can get some help to make Firefox in Armenian a better localized product and get us through the requirements that Mozilla expects. If you are interested on helping please keep on reading.

Briefly
There is two areas where I can get some help:

  1. If you have a list SIX search engines that matches the criterias in this page (more or less) and a news feed of articles in Armenian I would greatly appreciate it if you could email them to all of us and discuss them. This area of help is called Productization.
  2. You can already start translating the the following pages in the Firefox in-product pages section and send them over. This area is known as Web Parts.

Expanded
In this section I expand the previous section. You can help in these areas.

First area requires to actually be a person that visits Armenian websites and knows different search providers that Armenians use (not sure how many of you browse Armenian websites frequently). If you read this page you can see that we need few things:
  • Live Bookmark (I believe this is just an RSS feed of a news website in Armenian with good quality articles)
  • Search engines (on Firefox on the top right there is a search box which has 6 different search engines)
    • There are three different types: generic, e-Commerce search (e.g. Amazon) and specific interest search.
There are a couple more of items in that page but I will have to ask around to know what I should be looking for.

In the second area I can get some help it is to translate few different pages where users normally land into (e.g. First Run Page, About Mozilla). The list of pages is indicated in the section "Firefox in-product pages". I believe we will be granted access to some type of web interface to do the translations but you are more than welcome to do some of it already.

Best regards,
Armen


Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Kiss CentOS unit tests good bye (on mozilla-central)

Hi all,
This was discussed few weeks ago in the Tuesday planning meeting and it is now that we are able to discontinue the unit test coverage on the build machines on mozilla-central.

We now have unit tests coverage only on the Talos/Rev3 machines on Fedora 12.
To note that up until now we were having dual coverage (CentOS and Fedora) and we were just waiting for the right moment to stop running unit tests on the Linux build VMs.

What does this mean for a developer? You won't see on TBPL something like this:
    Mo (1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 oth oth)
but instead this:
    Mo (1 2 3 4 5 oth)
Makes sense? :)

This will enable us to free a lot of load from the Linux builders and we can re-purpose some machines were we need them more.

The next step will be to enable Fedora coverage on more branches but we need few improvements on the talos master before we can do it. After that and only then we will be able to disable completely the CentOS coverage for the remaining branches.

CentOS coverage was disabled this morning in this bug:



Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Firefox in Armenian is available (language pack)

In my previous post we had almost completed and we were working on creating a langpack. In this post you will see that we have a working langpack and that we are getting even closer.

On April 16th (I know this are old news but still) we got our "Armenian (hy-AM Language Pack" out and since then we have got a little more than a 100 downloads (not too many but we will get there).

We (me and Robert Sargsyan) are waiting to be the registered Armenian localization team. So far we have passed the first review and one more review is to happen before we become the official team (I believe).

The following steps would be to find out how to become a "beta" locale for Firefox 4 and manage to get a large number of users.

I think that the plan is to:
We welcome any suggestions on how to promote our langpack or what route to take from here.

You can also visit our support site: http://bitbucket.org/armenzg/firefox-in-armenian


Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Monday, June 07, 2010

How to build Firefox on Windows 64-bit machine with Visual Studio 2010

I thought you might want to know what are the instructions how to generate a Windows 64-bit build of Firefox with VS2010.

Setup instructions
  1. Install Visual Studio 2010 Pro (4/12/2010, vs_proweb.exe)
  2. Install Windows 7 SDK (winsdk_web.exe - v7 - 7/24/2009 )  
  3. Install MozillaBuild 1.4
  4. Download into your Mozilla Build installation directory (e.g. C:\mozilla-build) the following files:
  5. Rename or delete this file:


    • C:\mozilla-build\vim\vim72\install.exe
    NOTE: At the time of posting MozillaBuild 1.5 has not yet been released. Steps 4 and 5 should not apply with the new version.

     Now let's build
    • Start Mozilla Build with start-msvc10-x64.bat
    • Use for instance this mozconfig 
    . $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
    
    ac_add_options --target=x86_64-pc-mingw32
    ac_add_options --host=x86_64-pc-mingw32 
    # Once we fix jemalloc for VC10 + x64 - bug 569375
    export WIN32_REDIST_DIR="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\redist\x64\Microsoft.VC100.CRT"
    •  and then:
    make -f client.mk build
      NOTE: The WIN32_REDIST_DIR is because we don't have jemalloc support for VS2010; we do have support for it in VS2008 and VS2005 (therefore you won't need the WIN32_REDIST_DIR line). For VS2005 use start-msvc8-x64.bat and for VS2008 use start-msvc9-x64.bat (NOTE I have not tested it myself).

      I hope this helps you out,
      Armen

      EDIT: I had to switch VS2005 and VS2008 in the last note of this post. I had them switched. Thanks Makoto!


      Creative Commons License
      This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.