Thunderbird 3.0b3 schedule change

The Thunderbird developers have decided that there are enough blockers that aren't going to make it by tomorrow that beta3 (and therefore the string freeze as well) will have to be slipped by some number of weeks. By how many weeks is currently unclear. We'll hopefully know more within the next several days and expect to have a proposal soon...

Localizing the values in search-attributes.properties for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey

A few weeks ago in mid-March we came across a fix (for bug 483629) that changed an existing string without changing the entity name. Instead of fixing that, we opted for going into the direction of fixing all the strings in

• mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/search-attributes.properties
• suite/locales/en-US/chrome/mailnews/search-attributes.properties

properly and get rid of all the magic numbers that posed as entity names (and remove some obsolete strings in the process as well). Fortunately that work has now been completed by Kent James and the fix for bug 484147 was landed a few days ago.

What this means for new localizers is, that the entity names are now much more self-explaining than they were before. However for existing localizers this means, that a lot of new strings have shown up, which you will now have to tackle again. We believe that this is the right solution for the reasons outlined above.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the corresponding thread in the mozilla l10n newsgroup.

Updated Thunderbird 3 beta3 release schedule for localizers

There's been a slight change of plans for the Thunderbird 3 beta3 release. The release schedule has been pushed back a week. That means that the new release schedule is now (All dates use time of 23:59 PST - l10n-relevant dates are bold):

• Slushy String freeze date: 2009-04-28 (Tuesday)
• Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-04-30 (Thursday)
• Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-05-05 (Tuesday)
• l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-05-07 (Thursday)
• Target Build Ship date: 2009-05-12 (Tuesday)

As with our beta2 release, these dates have the following goals:

• All string-related work should done by the slushy string freeze date
• All other code-related work plus the late-string work should ideally be done by the slushy code freeze date
• The firm freeze date will be for fixing remaining bugs and regressions found in the nightlies
• The l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 date would be the last time by which we would accept changes in localizations
• Late string changes will require an additional approval by the beta3 release driver Dan Mosedale (dmose on IRC)

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to respond here.