locales.rst

Localization (l10n)

Single-locale language repacks

To save on build time, the build system and automation collaborate to allow downloading a packaged en-US Firefox, performing some locale-specific post-processing, and re-packaging a locale-specific Firefox. Such artifacts are termed "single-locale language repacks". There is another concept of a "multi-locale language build", which is more like a regular build and less like a re-packaging post-processing step.

There are scripts in-tree in mozharness to orchestrate these re-packaging steps for Desktop and Android but they rely heavily on buildbot information so they are almost impossible to run locally.

The following instructions are extracted from the Android script with hg hash 494289c7, and may need to be updated and slightly modified for Desktop.

Step by step instructions for Android

This assumes that $AB_CD is the locale you want to repack with; I tested with "ar" and "en-GB".

Warning

l10n repacks do not work with artifact builds. Repackaging compiles no code so supporting --disable-compile-environment would not save much, if any, time.

1. You must have a built and packaged object directory, or a pre-built en-US package.

   ./mach build
   ./mach package

2. Clone l10n-central/$AB_CD so that it is a sibling to your mozilla-central directory.

   $ ls -al
   mozilla-central
   ...
   $ mkdir -p l10n-central
   $ hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/$AB_CD l10n-central/$AB_CD
   $ ls -al
   mozilla-central
   l10n-central/$AB_CD
   ...

3. Copy your mozconfig to mozconfig.l10n and add the following.

   ac_add_options --with-l10n-base=../../l10n-central
   ac_add_options --disable-tests
   mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=./objdir-l10n
   

4. Configure and prepare the l10n object directory.

   MOZCONFIG=mozconfig.l10n ./mach configure
   MOZCONFIG=mozconfig.l10n ./mach build -C config export
   MOZCONFIG=mozconfig.l10n ./mach build buildid.h

5. Copy your built package and unpack it into the l10n object directory.

   cp $OBJDIR/dist/fennec-*en-US*.apk ./objdir-l10n/dist
   MOZCONFIG=mozconfig.l10n ./mach build -C mobile/android/locales unpack

6. Run the compare-locales script to write locale-specific changes into objdir-l10n/merged.

   MOZCONFIG=mozconfig.l10n ./mach compare-locales --merge-dir objdir-l10n/merged $AB_CD

7. Finally, repackage using the locale-specific changes.

   MOZCONFIG=mozconfig.l10n LOCALE_MERGEDIR=`realpath objdir-l10n/merged` ./mach build -C mobile/android/locales installers-$AB_CD

   (Note the absolute path for LOCALE_MERGEDIR.) You should find a re-packaged build at objdir-l10n/dist/fennec-*$AB_CD*.apk.