Hi localizers,
A significant change is going to happen to Mozilla’s release model, and
is going to happen quickly, in just a few days.
The Aurora branch will be discontinued on April 18 (next Tuesday).
In the original plan for Rapid Release Cycle, Aurora was supposed to
represent a first stabilization channel, with a userbase about 10 times
the size of Nightly’s, providing an additional cycle of user feedback.
It was also chosen as the branch to focus localization activity on,
since only string changes explicitly allowed could land, giving
localizers time to work on translation and testing before their work
reached a larger audience with Beta and Release.
With significant improvements in stability and performance in the
Nightly channel we have determined that we tend to gain more time by
testing and localizing in Nightly and stabilizing in Beta. The increased
speed to market and resulting quality and stability in the Beta channel
is why Aurora is going to be discontinued on April 18 (next merge day,
exceptionally on Tuesday).
On April 18, code for Firefox 54 is moving from Aurora to Beta as usual,
while Firefox 55 will remain on Nightly for a second cycle in a row (a
total of 14 weeks). On next merge day, June 12, Firefox 55 will move
directly from Nightly to Beta.
Between April and June, Firefox on desktop will continue to receive
updates for critical security issues and the Aurora and Developer
Edition populations will be migrated to the Beta update channel. On
Android, Aurora users will be migrated to Nightly.
More details will be available in the official FAQs that will be
published early next week.
*Impact on the localization process*
On April 18 (Monday evening, European time) we’ll disable all the Aurora
projects on both Pontoon and Pootle, in order to minimize the risk of
losing data. Starting from April 19, right after merge day, you’ll need
to focus your localization on Nightly (
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Nightly)
instead of Aurora. We will work to ensure that localization tools will
be ready shortly after merge day.
This means that you will see more string changes, more frequently. To
avoid the risk of exposing poor strings to localizers, we plan to
publish new strings only once or twice a week. If you’re working
directly on Mercurial, or you’re interested in the technical details,
see the FAQs linked at the end of this email.
The original plan was to have cross-channel[1] available by the time
Project Dawn was in place, but the unexpected schedule acceleration
won’t make that possible. We expect to have it implemented by the time
Firefox 56 is available on the Nightly channel, and that will allow
localizers to work on one repository for both Nightly and Beta.
One other consequence is that all the testers you currently have on
Aurora will move to Beta around the end of the month. Pascal Chevrel,
who's been working on increasing Nightly's population in the past
months, has offered his help in building out a testing population on
Nightly. Among other things, we plan to run messages in about:home to
invite users of localized builds to install Nightly, but you should plan
to reach out to your community nonetheless.
From April 19, all localizers should migrate to Nightly and start using
it for testing their work. We now have builds for all languages that
previously had Aurora builds.
You can download Firefox Nightly (for desktop) from here
https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/channel/desktop/#nightly
Firefox for Android Nightly (multilocale) is available here
https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/channel/android/#nightly
If this page is not available in your language, it means that
mozilla.org translation is behind and you should translate it as soon as
possible. Please check your webdashboard:
https://l10n.mozilla-community.org/webdashboard/
In the meantime, you can use this page to download your localized
Nightly build
https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/all/
We’ve started building a series of Frequently Asked Questions, the
document is available here:
https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/localizer-documentation/blob/master/misc/aurora_faqs.md
It currently covers the same topics explained in this email, in some
cases with a bit more details.
It’s going to be a live, constantly evolving document: if you have any
questions, please ask here and we’ll update it as needed with relevant
information.
Francesco
[1]
https://blog.mozilla.org/l10n/2016/06/17/mozlondon-localization-sessions/