Gaia: DEBUG=1 in desktop builds currently broken & how to test in Firefox

[Staś Małolepszy]

I know some of you use the default desktop builds (with 4 locales
enabled) and then follow the instructions on the wiki (DEBUG=1 make
etc.) to test your localizations. I have some news for you.


The good & the very good
------------------------

The annoying bug which hindered testing on Linux has been fixed and has
now landed on central, aurora and beta!

B2G desktop doesn't redraw the UI properly
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=799768

This means that there should be no more need of my custom b2g builds.

Even better news: we're making excellent progress on producing official
localized builds. If you're interested, follow these two bugs:

Set up nightly multilocale B2G desktop builds for l10n testing
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=812836

Create Gaia build config to create multilocale profiles
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=812829

It looks like we might be able to get those builds going next week!


The bad
-------

The perf is better, and we're about to start doing localized nightlies?
What's not to like?

Unfortunately, there's currently a bug which breaks profiles made with
DEBUG=1.

It might end up being one of these, or maybe it is an unrelated issue:

DEBUG=1 make install-gaia will lead to black screen
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=802976

Cannot use the device because of a black 'mozilla' screen over the
homescreen
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=813900


Temporary solution
------------------

If you run into the black screen bug mentioned above, you could try
doing your l10n testing in Firefox, instead of a b2g desktop build.

Follow all the instructions on the wiki like you'd normally would:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:B2G/Localizers#Testing

Instead of running the b2g-bin binary with -profile, run Firefox. For
instance:

/usr/bin/firefox -profile gaia/profile

A browser window will open and it will be black. This is a known issue.
Just open a new tab and go to about:config. Look for
'intl.accept_languages' and prepend your locale code to its value. So
if you're Polish, you'd do:

intl.accept_languages pl, en-US, en

Then, browse to any app, for example:

http://browser.gaiamobile.org:8080/

And voilá!

Use the Responsive Design Mode to adjust the size of the viewport. It
may look like this:

http://ubuntuone.com/54S7HOYGO2ctVaUrMZ8DCC

You can even use the Inspector and try out different translations on the
fly!

HTH,
-stas