A bit of background on Beta 2, Beta 3, what's in and why and such

[Axel Hecht]

Hi,

I promised a post about what we've been thinking in doing the Beta 2 and
3 after "just one Beta" Beta 1.

There were a few incremental code fixes and features that the Firefox
team wanted to expose to the beta testers. That would have been totally
incremental from Beta 1 to Beta 2 if there hadn't been those few added
strings. Here's what we put on the table to pick from:

- not ship locales that were in B1 but had missing strings
- land the missing strings on default, ship, back them out again
- cut the relbranch, land the missing strings on the relbranch, ship
from that
- fix the release automation to include l10n-merge if wanted

We did the first.

We did actively discuss padding the B1 locales with en-US strings,
mostly because the strings were few, and not in users eyes all day. In
return to that slightly degraded user experience, we'd possibly get more
testing on the dll blacklisting stuff, which we wanted to get in
particular from our international beta testers. Funky apps installing
funky things in Firefox application directories differ from the US to
europe to china to whatnot.

I would have loved to do 4, maybe 3. But timing was too tight to get the
release machinery bumped, and joduinn really hated 3.

I really hated 2. Landing on default while we're asking everybody to go
in and work and then have, IIRC well over ten, locales actually need to
merge their own work with us adding strings at the wrong place and all. Bah.

So we ended up pulling a few locales that were in B1 from B2. If the
website logic would be even more fancy than it already is, we would have
left B1 up for download for those locales, probably. But that's life.

And now you know.

Comments? In particular, would you have considered shipping just this
beta with 9 padded strings (without touching your repos) would have been
OK? If our judgment would have been off, I'd love to hear.

Axel

[flod (Francesco Lodolo)]

Il 13/11/09 21:40, Axel Hecht ha scritto:

> Comments? In particular, would you have considered shipping just this
> beta with 9 padded strings (without touching your repos) would have
> been OK? If our judgment would have been off, I'd love to hear.

IMO #4 is absolutely fine for beta releases, even with a bigger set of
untranslated strings.

I don't really #2 and #3, since l10n repositories are already a
challenge to manage (take for example mozilla-1.9.1, I'm updating
SeaMonkey strings and have to fight every time with TB3 and FX35 tags
and heads).

Francesco

[Rimas Kudelis]

Axel Hecht rašė:

I think #3 or #4 would be OK. Answer to flod's comment: we don't usually
do anything in relbranches after these are cut, so I don't see any
additional burden here.

RQ