Updates on next merge day (June 12) and cross-channel

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Hi localizers,
A quick update about cross-channel and next merge day. As anticipated,
on June 12 Firefox 55 will move directly to Beta, and 56 will start a
new cycle on Nightly.

Unlike we originally planned[1], cross-channel won't be available by
that date, so we won't be able to use one single repository to localize
all channels. Since strings will keep landing in the next days, even if
it should happen at a lower frequency, we'll work with Pontoon and
Pootle to allow you to work on the Beta channel too. After merge day
you'll find the usual "Firefox" project (for Nightly), and a "Firefox
Beta" project to localize Beta. We won't enable a Beta project for other
products (Firefox for Android, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey), since these
products received very few new strings over the past year, or follow a
different release cadence (ESR).

There's one fundamental aspect to remember when working on Beta: if you
add a translation in the Beta project, or fix an error, this will only
be applied to Beta. You will then need to manually update the main
project, otherwise your work will be lost on the following merge day.
Naturally you will be able to rely on your tool's translation memory,
but it's not an automated process.

For this reason, our suggestion is to use the following 2 weeks to catch
up as much as you can with translation on Nightly, and only use Beta for
the remaining strings, in particular those landing at the last moment.

We're really sorry for making your work even more complicated.
Cross-channel is a fundamental piece in the roadmap to make localization
easier at Mozilla, unfortunately it's also a complicated problem to crack.

Let us know if you have any doubts or questions.

Francesco

[1]
https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/localizer-documentation/blob/master/misc/aurora_faqs.md

[Michal Stanke]

Thank you for update, Francesco.

I keep the fingers crossed to make it for the next cycle. We try to keep
the pace with new strings in Nightly, I check the project on Pontoon every
few days. So far it works well, except the performance preferences strings,
that got changed couple of Times already. :-(

--
Michal Stanke

Dne 31. 5. 2017 16:45 napsal uživatel "Francesco Lodolo [:flod]" <
fl...@lodolo.net>:

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[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Il 31/05/17 16.45, Francesco Lodolo [:flod] ha scritto:

> There's one fundamental aspect to remember when working on Beta: if
> you add a translation in the Beta project, or fix an error, this will
> only be applied to Beta. You will then need to manually update the
> main project, otherwise your work will be lost on the following merge
> day. Naturally you will be able to rely on your tool's translation
> memory, but it's not an automated process.

Friendly reminder now that Beta is enabled on both Pootle and Pontoon.

If your localization is missing several hundreds of strings, my
suggestion would be to use Beta only to fix errors, and focus the
localization effort and testing on nightly.

Francesco