Thunderbird Localization (L10n)

Resignation as Thunderbird l10n contact

2010-08-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

it's really hard for me, but I've decided to resign from my role as Thunderbird l10n contact as of today (Monday).

Within the last six months it has become clear to me, that I'm not able to do the job adequately anymore, as my time has been more and more occupied with matters related to my private life and my day job. Therefore I've not been able to dedicate as much volunteer time to this role as I would have liked or hoped.

I don't want to fill a role any longer, where I'm not satisfied with my performance and where a motivated person with more time on his/her hands could really make the difference, that I can't make anymore.

Right now I'm working on a transition plan with the folks of Mozilla Messaging. Once a new person takes over, I'll make sure to be available and help him/her with ramping up in the new role. If anybody is interested in picking up some or all of this work, we (meaning Mozilla Messaging or me) would love to talk to you.

I've written up a list of things, that I've performed regularly in this role to give people an impression of what's involved. The list is available here.

If you are thinking about taking on this job, let me tell you in short what makes it so rewarding:
I think being part of a team and being responsible for bringing TB to new people in new markets is particularly rewarding. When I look back and see that we had 38 locales with TB2, are now at 52 and have the potential to reach 80 locales, I see a lot of potential new TB users, which the l10n coordinator would at affect. Working with so many different people (localizers, developers, users) is also something that I've always thrived on. So please get in touch!

It's been a real pleasure working with all of you.

PS: I will also resign from my different roles in the Calendar Project. Please see this blog post for more information.

Thunderbird 3.1 RC1 - sign-off deadline extended by 24 hours

2010-05-18T01:48:00.000-07:00

Because some bugs didn't get fixed in time, the RC1 of Thunderbird 3.1 has been postponed by one day. Therefore We will accept sign-ins until Tuesday 18th May @ 23:59 PDT.

Please go to the l10n dashboard and sign-off for your locale once your locale has gone green.

Thunderbird 3.1 RC1 - Please sign-in now!

2010-05-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

We have now landed the last two strings that we're going to do as late-l10n for 3.1rc1 - just two changes post beta 2.

That means, that we're complete and open for you to sign-in for Thunderbird 3.1 RC1. I've just opened the milestone for sign-ins. Please go to the l10n dashboard and sign-in for your locale once your locale has gone green.

We will accept sign-ins until Monday 17th May @ 23:59 PDT, which is one day later than we have previously announced.

Feedback wanted - Thunderbird 3.1 RC1 schedule

2010-04-30T07:43:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers have asked me to forward this to you and to ask for FEEDBACK. So if you have a problem with the proposed schedule, PLEASE speak up.

Based on where we are with blockers etc, the Thunderbird drivers have proposed a schedule for getting to RC 1. The schedule is challenging, but we believe it is a good starting point.

We would like to get feedback from those with blockers, and others on their thoughts for this schedule:
Code freeze: could be anywhere between 10th and 14th May
probably 13th or 14th May.
L10n completion: 16th May 23:59 PDT (end of day Sunday)
Build Starts: 17th May (Monday)
QA starts: 18th May (Tuesday)
RC1 release: 25th May (Tuesday)
This gives us about 2 weeks to be code complete, including addressing feedback from beta 2.

That schedule would give you little less than 2.5 weeks for additional translation and l10n QA work. Is that enough? If not, please speak up here in the l10n newsgroup.

Extension of l10n sign-in deadline for Thunderbird 3.1 beta2

2010-04-28T01:08:00.000-07:00

We've been discussing the l10n status of the TB 3.1 beta2 release internally. We have come to the conclusion, that due to the high number of late-l10n checkins, we need to extend the l10n sign-in deadline by three days. That should give localizers more time to adequately test their localization.

Therefore the new sign-in deadline is: Thursday April 29th 23:59, pacific time

Please use the new sign-in functionality in the l10n dashboard to become part of this release with your latest revision.

String freeze for Thunderbird 3.1 beta2 and Thunderbird 3.1 (final release) was yesterday (April 20 2010)

2010-04-20T02:15:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to remind everyone, that the string freeze for Thunderbird 3.1 beta2 and the Thunderbird 3.1 final release went into effect yesterday, Tuesday April 20 at 23:59 PST.

I am planning to accept sign-ins up until Monday April 26th pacific time for the beta2 release. For the final release the sign-in period will be a few weeks longer. I can't tell you at the moment how long, but expect at least 4-5 more weeks.

Please use the new sign-in functionality in the l10n dashboard to become part of these releases. Currently you can only sign-in for the 3.1 beta2 release. I'll open up the sign-in possibility for the final release soon.

UPDATE:
Four bugs didn't make it in time for the string freeze. Those are bug 545469, bug 545955, bug 505035 and bug 394687. I've added the late-l10n keyword to all those bugs and asked the responsible developers to inform the l10n community once those strings have landed.

Thunderbird 3.1 string freeze has been postponed

2010-03-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

The string freeze for Thunderbird 3.1, which was originally planned for yesterday, has been postponed for a few days. I can't say for how many right now, but I will post here as soon as I learn more.

We're still waiting for a few important fixes, mainly the migration assistant and a new quick search. We'll need to solicit feedback on those patches before we can move further towards the Lanikai 3.1 beta2 release (Lanikai is the codename for the Thunderbird 3.1 series).

Attention localizers: Please move your Thunderbird localization to the l10n-mozilla-1.9.2 repository

2010-03-04T02:45:00.000-08:00

From looking at the Thunderbird 3.1 dashboard it looks like a lot of localizations (13) that were part of the Thunderbird 3.0 release still need to move their existing localization over from their 1.9.1 l10n repository to their 1.9.2 l10n repository.

Right now the amount of changes between Thunderbird 3.0 and the current Thunderbird 3.1 builds are pretty small. Just moving an existing TB3 localization over to the 1.9.2 repo means that the dashboard will report 19 missing strings and 5 obsolete strings.

So with very little effort localizers can get their locale green again.

String freeze for Thunderbird 3.1 beta1 is today

2010-02-23T09:24:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to remind everyone that today, Tuesday February 23 at 23:59 PST, the string freeze for Thunderbird 3.1 beta1 will go into effect.

We are planning to accept sign-ins up until Monday March 1 pacific time. Please use the new sign-in functionality in the l10n dashboard to become part of this release.

Updated release schedule for Thunderbird 3.1 (Lanikai)

2010-02-15T01:23:00.000-08:00

There are some news regarding the Thunderbird 3.1 release schedule, which I wanted to share with everyone:

The Thunderbird developers have decided to add another milestone (the Thunderbird 3.1 beta2 release) to the Thunderbird 3.1 schedule. This additional milestone will approximately add one month to the overall release schedule. That means that the release date of Thunderbird 3.1 is now estimated for June 1, 2010.
The string freeze date has been shifted accordingly. The overall string freeze for Thunderbird 3.1 will now coincide with the Thunderbird beta2 string freeze, which is currently scheduled for March 23, 2010.

The death of opt-in threads is imminent

2010-02-08T05:22:00.000-08:00

Good news, for localizers. With the new release of the l10n dashboard, co-developed by Pike (Axel Hecht) and Gandalf (Zbigniew Braniecki) we're killing off the opt-in threads for localizers.

Every localizer should take a close look at all the functionality that the new dashboard exposes. There is also a 5-minute screencast, that hopefully guides you through some of the new features.

We'll start to use this new functionality once Thunderbird 3.0.2 is out of the door. So Thunderbird 3.0.3 and onwards as well as Thunderbird 3.1 beta1 will be our starting points.

Localized Thunderbird 3.1 alpha1 release

2010-01-26T02:06:00.000-08:00

One week ago, I told you that we won't be able to release Thunderbird 3.1 alpha1 as a localized release and that the release will be en-US-only. We've reversed course on that issue, since we now have a working l10n dashboard now for TB 3.1 and because the TB 3.1 alpha1 release will be postponed by one week.

Therefore everyone interested in being part of the TB 3.1 alpha1 release should hop over to the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup and opt in for this release.

L10n-wise we will be doing this release from the l10n-mozilla-1.9.2 repository. Please do not opt-in to this release, unless

the l10n dashboard at http://l10n.mozilla.org/dashboard/?tree=tb31x shows your locale as green
the comm-1.9.2 trees on your l10n tinderbox page (http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Mozilla-l10n-locale) is green for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X

Information regarding the upcoming Thunderbird 3.1 release

2010-01-21T05:48:00.000-08:00

as most of you know, after the successful release of Thunderbird 3, we are now moving towards our next major release Thunderbird 3.1 (codename Lanikai). Lanikai is scheduled to be released in early April 2010 and will be a considerably smaller release compared with the move from TB2 to TB3. This should result in a lot less string changes.

A draft release schedule of Thunderbird 3.1 is available on the mozilla.org wiki. Please note, that this is a preliminary schedule and still subject to change. In case of significant changes, I will of course notify the l10n community as soon as I become aware of those changes.

As of now, Thunderbird 3.1 is developed from the comm-central repository for all TB-related changes and the mozilla-1.9.2 repository for all core backend changes.

As a consequence that, l10n work on the respective TB3.1 localizations should happen on the respective l10n-mozilla-1.9.2 repositories. The same repositories that you use for the Firefox 3.6 localization.

For this we have updated the l10n dashboard. The tb31x tree there should now correctly report each localization's l10n-status. Looking at the dashboard now, it looks like many localizations will need to sync their 1.9.2 l10n repository with the work that they performed on their 1.9.1 l10n repository already. Some locales will have to move all their Thunderbird-related work (mail/, editor/ directories plus from other-licenses/branding/thunderbird/) over to their 1.9.2 repository. If you need any help with this, feel free to contact me and I'll help you with the move.

The barrier has been broken - Thunderbird 3.0.1 has been released in 50 languages

2010-01-21T01:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we released Thunderbird 3.0.1 into the wild, our first security and stability release.

What makes this release so special is that we released TB 3.0.1 in 50 languages, thanks to the huge efforts of the Danish l10n community.

In this release, the Danish builds are released as "beta", but this is really just a precaution on our side and not necessarily an indicator of the localization quality of the Danish builds. It is our policy to let localizations go through a beta cycle, in most cases along the beta cycle of the product itself. If a localization is late-in-coming, we'll be releasing it for at least one release in "beta" state and move it to the final state, if we do not hear any major complaints from the local community.

Adding more locales for Thunderbird 3.0

2010-01-18T01:33:00.000-08:00

As mentioned during the release announcement of Thunderbird 3, we missed the 50 locales mark by just one locale. The main reason for that was, that three of the locales that had supported us for the Thunderbird 2 release 2.5 years ago (Danish, Macedonian and Slovenian) didn't have the resources to localize Thunderbird in time for the final release.

Fortunately I can now report, that two of those three locales (Danish and Slovenian) have recruited new talent for their localization teams:

The Danish team has been able to recruit about half a dozen volunteers, who have been really hard at work during the weeks after the Thunderbird 3 release, tackling over 2000 unlocalized strings, removing hundreds of obsolete strings and doing lots of QA work after the initial localization work was finished. They will already be part of our upcoming Thunderbird 3.0.1 maintenance release, which will be out on Wednesday.
The Slovenian team has recruited one new team member, who is also working through over 2000 unlocalized strings, though at a smaller pace for obvious reasons. I currently hope to add Slovenian as a supported locale for the second maintenance release, Thunderbird 3.0.2.

Each of these locales (as well as the 48 others, that already were part of the Thunderbird 3 release) would certainly welcome each interested person, who is willing to help. If you want to help, hop over to the list of l10n teams and contact the team leader.

There are various ways where help is needed and you can also help if your English isn't good enough to do the actual translation work by proofreading the translations or doing QA work (e.g. checking keyboard shortcuts). Each effort is very much appreciated and you could make a difference for thousands of people in your country and around the world.

Thunderbird 3.1 update

2010-01-18T01:19:00.000-08:00

Now that Thunderbird 3.0 has been released and has been very well received, we are looking towards our next release, Thunderbird 3.1 (codename Lanikai).

The first milestone build of Thunderbird 3.1, Thunderbird 3.1 alpha1 will be out in a few days, but will only be release in English. The reason is mostly that we haven't been able to setup an
appropriate application target for TB 3.1 on the l10n dashboard yet (the current tb31x target is outdated). The fact, that Firefox also doesn't release its first alpha in localized versions also played into that decision.

Our next scheduled release, Thunderbird 3.1 beta1 is scheduled to be released roughly one month from now. This release will be a fully localized release. I hope you will hop on board then.

Thunderbird 3.0 released in 49 languages

2009-12-13T04:26:00.000-08:00

In case you didn't notice, five days ago we finally released Thunderbird 3.0 into the wild. This is a huge achievement for everyone involved. I want to focus particularly on the localization aspect as we've come a long way since our last major release (Thunderbird 2) two and a half years ago.

Back then we had a pretty small l10n community (38 locales) which was mostly centered around Europe. With Thunderbird 3 we've expanded that community significantly to 49 locales and we've picked up a lot of languages, mostly from the Asian continent along the way. Overall we've added 14 languages (Arabian, Bengali, Estonian, Frisian, Galician, Indonesian, Icelandic, Georgian, Romanian, Sinhala, Albanian, Serbian, Tamil, and Vietnamese) but unfortunately we also lost three languages since TB2 (Danish, Macedonian and Slovenian).

This is a significant achievement because at the time we were releasing Thunderbird 3, localizers also had to work on the translations for the upcoming Firefox 3.6 and Mobile Firefox 1.0 releases. So my hat goes off to the all our localizers who put who put in a awesome amount of effort to make a localized Thunderbird 3 release in their language a reality.

As for the languages that didn't make it for Thunderbird 3.0, the Danish folks are already playing catch-up and we will start some outreach actions towards the Macedonian and Slovenian communities as well to try to find some localizers there again. If you're interested in contributing to these efforts, please leave me a note here on the blog.

For Thunderbird 3.1 we'll have to see what comes next. I've already been in contact with a few localization teams who are thinking hard about starting a Thunderbird translation into their language. Hopefully I can say more about this soon.

Extension of l10n opt-in period for Thunderbird 3 RC1

2009-11-04T01:40:00.000-08:00

The Thunderbird developers have slightly revised their release schedule and are now planning to start the builds for TB3 RC1 on the upcoming Sunday or Monday.

As a result I'll be extending the opt-in period for all participating locales until next Saturday (November 7) 23:59 CET. Please post your changeset updates into the existing opt-in thread.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here or in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.

Thunderbird 3 status update - 2nd update

2009-10-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

Thunderbird 3 status update

2009-10-13T02:54:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers have decided to aim for Tuesday, November 3 2009 as the release date of the first release candidate (RC1) of Thunderbird 3.0.

We are planning to accept localizations up until the Monday pacific time before that day. (November 2 23:59 PST). So please opt-in for the Thunderbird 3.0 final release until then. You can opt-in in the corresponding opt-in thread in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup. If we decide to do further release candidates, we'll also accept more localization fixes from localizers.

We're not really there yet with our final story on the web l10n front, as I told some of you on the last weekend in Prague, but our marketing person, Rafael Rebron, and Pascal Chevrel are working hard on that and will update you on this matter in the next few days.

As of now, on the code side, things are already looking great with 38 locales already being green on the dashboard and more hopefully still to come.

Thunderbird L10n at Mozilla Camp Europe 2009

2009-10-03T01:42:00.000-07:00

I'm in Prague right now at Mozilla Camp Europe 2009, where the whole European Mozilla community has gathered. I'm looking forward to meet most of our European localizers and drink some beers with them :)

I'll also be part of the Thunderbird talk that Ludovic Hirlimann is doing tomorrow about Thunderbird 3.

On a whole different topic: 17 locales have already translated all their strings for Thunderbird 3. More will hopefully follow soon. Very exciting!

Thunderbird strings are now frozen for Thunderbird 3.0

2009-09-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to remind everyone that as of last night, Tuesday, September 29 at 23:59 PST, we're are now string frozen for the final release of Thunderbird 3.0.

Since the beta4 release one week ago, we have added 178 and removed 63 strings. More detailed information for each locale can be found on the localization dashboard for Thunderbird 3.0.

We currently do not expect to have more string updates/additions/removals, but if those arise the rules described on the Thunderbird l10n guide are binding for each developer.

We do not have a firm release date set for our first release candidate, but localizers should expect a minimum of 4 weeks time before the first release candidate will be made public. I will open up an opt-in thread in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup soon.

String freeze date for Thunderbird 3.0 confirmed

2009-09-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

As I already outlined five weeks ago the string freeze date for the final release of Thunderbird 3.0 has been finalized. We will freeze all strings on September 29 2009 at 23:59 PST.

No firm dates for the release of the first release candidate (RC1) of Thunderbird 3.0 have been finalized, but localizers can expect a minimum of 4 weeks time before the first release candidate will be made public.

Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 is now available in 43 languages

2009-09-23T00:54:00.000-07:00

Mozilla Messaging announced yesterday that the final beta release for Thunderbird 3, Thunderbird 3.0 beta 4, is now available for download. This release contains quite a lot of changes compared to the previous beta 3 release.

New Search with Advanced Filtering Tools

Search results now include advanced filtering tools. You have the option to filter your results by sender, tag, attachments, people, folder, and mailing list. You can also filter your email using the timeline tool.

New Global Search field and Redesigned Mail Toolbar

The Mail Toolbar is redesigned to include the new Global Search bar. Buttons such as reply, forward, delete, junk are part of each email message. When typing in the Global Search field, Thunderbird autocompletes against your address book. You have the option of searching everywhere or filtering within folders against different parts of the email such as by subject or by sender.

New Mail Account Setup Wizard

The new Mail Account Setup Wizard matches against a database of email settings from popular mail providers so that you will only need to provide your name, email, and password to set up new mail accounts.

Smart Folders

The folder pane offers a Smart Folders mode which combines special mailboxes (e.g. Inbox) from multiple accounts together. Smart Folders is now on by default.

From an l10n perspective, it would be great if everyone could thoroughly test these new features in their localized release. Like in the two previous beta releases, Thunderbird 3.0 beta 4 is available in 43 languages.

17 hours to go for Thunderbird 3.0 beta 4 localizations...

2009-09-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

Our current status is that 28 locales have opted in so far with a little bit less than 17 hours to go until we start to produce our first localized candidate builds. At the moment eight locales have not opted in yet even though they are green on the dashboard.

Hopefully these locales will still opt-in and more will join the ride. If that does not happen I will take all locales, which are green or orange on the dashboard and the l10n tinderboxen into this release to give localizers maximum test exposure before the final release, unless I'm explicitly forbidden to do so by a localizer for his locale.

One more note:
Even though we will actually freeze all localizations at 23:59 PST tonight, our build engineer will only start the builds when he gets to work tomorrow morning pacific time. So if you really can't make it within the next 17 hours, but are able to complete your localization shortly thereafter I will still accept your changes for a few hours after the communicated deadline.

Thunderbird strings are now frozen for Thunderbird 3 beta 4

2009-09-10T02:13:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to remind everyone that as of last night, Wednesday, September 9 at 23:59 PST, the firm string freeze went into effect. That means that all strings are now entirely frozen until we release Thunderbird 3 beta4.

We are planning to accept localizations up until Monday night next week pacific time (September 14 23:59 PST). So please opt-in for the beta 4 release until then. You can opt-in in the corresponding opt-in thread in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.

String freeze announcement for Thunderbird 3 final

2009-08-18T01:37:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers have also discussed the timing of the overall string freeze for the final Thunderbird 3 release. Our proposal is to freeze all strings for Thunderbird 3 on September 29 2009, giving localizers a minimum of 4 weeks time before the first release candidate (RC1).

Please note that this date is preliminary at this point and will be reviewed as we approach the beta4 release date. We could move it forward if we are happy with the strings at b4 or we could move it back a bit if really needed.

However, the 4 weeks timeframe to get your localization in shape will remain in place. So if we decide to move the string freeze date forward or backward, localizers will always have at least four weeks to work on their localization for Thunderbird 3 without any string changes.

Thunderbird 3 beta4 release schedule for localizers

2009-08-18T01:22:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers have finalized the release schedule for Thunderbird beta4. Here it is (All dates use time of 23:59 PST - l10n-relevant dates are bold):

Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-09-07 (Monday)
Firm String freeze date: 2009-09-09 (Wednesday)
Firm Code Freeze date: 2009-09-11 (Friday)
l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-09-14 (Monday)
Release builds start: 2009-09-15 (Tuesday)
Estimated release date: 2009-09-22 (Tuesday)

These dates have the following goals:

All code-related work should ideally be done by the slushy code freeze date
The firm freeze date will be for fixing the remaining blocker bugs and bugs that have release driver approval (beta4 release driver is Mark Banner, Standard8 on IRC)
The l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 date would be the last time by which we would accept changes in localizations

The most obvious change for localizers (compared to the previous beta releases) is that we removed the slushy string freeze. We felt that the slushy string freeze caused more confusion than was necessary. As a trade-off we have added additional time between the firm string freeze and the l10n-cutoff date, to make it easier for localizers to get their locales in shape.

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

L10n-merge now active for Thunderbird nightly builds

2009-08-11T02:29:00.000-07:00

Good news!
We finally got around to fix bug 470673. Now that this is fixed, you should get regular nightly builds for your locale, even when the localization is not fully complete at the moment. A big thank you to Pike, Standard8 and Gozer.

Autoconfiguration strings have landed

2009-08-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

Those of you watching the new thunderbird@localization.bugs account already know this, but those that have missed this are advised, that a large number of strings (a little more than a hundred) for the new account autoconfiguration feature landed yesterday. More information can be found in the corresponding bug report (bug 490097).

There may be some further changes to these strings as we re-layout the autoconfig dialog, though those changes are expected to be minimal. These strings will be part of Thunderbird 3 beta4. I'll have more on the timeline of that release in a few days.

Thunderbird localization page moved from wiki.mozilla.org to developer.mozilla.org

2009-07-23T01:56:00.000-07:00

I just took the time to move the Thunderbird localization information from the wiki over to developer.mozilla.org. The new place to go to is:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird_Localization

I also used the opportunity to add a tiny bit of information and corrected a link. I hope this move makes this information more discoverable.

As always, if you think that there is something missing on that page or you find an error, feel free to edit page and add/correct the page.

New possibility to get l10n feedback for Thunderbird and Mailnews developers

2009-07-22T01:32:00.000-07:00

We have a new hook for folks to get feedback on how to expose patches to Thunderbird localizers. We created a bugzilla account thunderbird@localization.bugs (alias is :tb-l10n), which interested localizers are going to follow. I for one do at least.

So when you have a bug and need input on how to localize it, you can now CC :tb-l10n (part of that accounts real name) instead of just me, and get feedback from a variety of different localizers.

If you're a localizer that's willing to help out our developers on creating good patches for l10n (or you just want to stay informed of interesting patches), please start watching thunderbird@localization.bugs by editing your mail preferences on bugzilla.

PS: Thunderbird localizers might find it interesting that I've updated the Thunderbird localization wiki with more information on how to get l10n-relevant information for Thunderbird.

Thunderbird 3 beta3 released in 43 languages

2009-07-22T00:23:00.000-07:00

As Mozilla Messaging CTO Dan Mosedale points out, Thunderbird 3 beta3 was released a few hours ago in 43 languages. A big thanks to all the localizers who contributed to this.

There's a discussion over in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup which tries to collect the good and the bad of this release from a localization perspective. I would be glad, if all interested localizers could join that discussion.

Localized release candidate builds of Thunderbird 3.0 beta3 are available

2009-07-18T02:47:00.000-07:00

As Dan Mosedale points out the localization repacks for the first release candidate builds of 3.0 beta3 have been completed thanks to the great work of Gozer, the Mozilla Messaging build engineer.

Please check out the builds for your locale if you have the chance. We're particularly looking for folks who use POP to fetch their mail to give these builds a good once-over. That said, we'd very much appreciate all the testing help we can get.

If you do find bugs while testing, please mark them as blocking bug 489128. Thanks!

Assuming no show-stoppers are found, we hope to be able to release Thunderbird 3.0 beta3 on Tuesday, July 21st.

9 hours to go for beta3 localizations...

2009-07-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Our current status is that 37 locales have opted in so far with 9 hours to go until we start to produce our first localized candidate builds. At the moment five locales have not opted in yet even though they are green on the dashboard:
Indonesian, Polish, European Portuguese, Tamil and Vietnamese.

Hopefully these locales will still opt-in, although the Polish team has indicated that it might not want to participate in the beta3 release. Another hopeful candidate is the Dutch locale that misses just five strings. Hopefully they can make it as well for the beta3 release.

The other 11 locales have over a hundred untranslated strings and more, so it's unlikely, that they will be able to participate in the beta3 release.

One more note:
Even though we will actually freeze all localizations at 23:59 PST tonight, our build engineer Gozer will only start the builds when he gets to work tomorrow morning pacific time. So if you really can't make it within the next 9 hours, but are able to complete your localization shortly thereafter I will still accept opt-ins for a few hours after the communicated deadline.

All Thunderbird strings are now frozen for the Thunderbird 3 beta3 release

2009-07-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to remind everyone that as of last night, Tuesday, July 14 at 23:59 PST, the firm code and string freeze went into effect. That means that all strings are now entirely frozen until we release Thunderbird 3 beta3.

As of now 15 locales have already opted-in to be part of this release. An additional 19 locales are green (meaning that they have no missing strings in their localization) on our l10n dashboard and will hopefully opt-in soon. Hopefully even more will follow so that Thunderbird 3 beta3 will be the largest release in terms of the number of localized versions ever.

Please remember that we are planning to accept localizations up until tomorrow Thursday, July 16 23:59 PST. So please opt-in for the beta3 release until then. You can opt-in in the corresponding opt-in thread in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.

New Thunderbird 3 beta3 release schedule for localizers

2009-07-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers have finally finalized the release schedule for Thunderbird beta3. Here it is (All dates use time of 23:59 PST - l10n-relevant dates are bold):

Slushy String freeze date: 2009-07-02 (Thursday)
Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-07-07 (Tuesday)
Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-07-14 (Tuesday)
l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-07-16 (Thursday)
Target Build Ship date: 2009-07-21 (Tuesday)

I apologize for this late announcement (the first two dates have already passed by), but I was away on vacation last week and started this week in a new job, so I'm quite busy at the moment. Thankfully Mark Banner already posted this announcement in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup back on July 1st. So hopefully most of you already knew about this. I hope you can still manage to bring your locale in shape.

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.

Thunderbird 3.0b3 schedule change

2009-04-27T06:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-21T03:37:00.000-07:00

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

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

2009-04-15T02:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Thunderbird 3 beta3 release schedule for localizers

2009-03-30T04:02:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers have finalized the release schedule for Thunderbird beta3. Here it is (All dates use time of 23:59 PST - l10n-relevant dates are bold):

Slushy String freeze date: 2009-04-21 (Tuesday)
Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-04-23 (Thursday)
Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-04-28 (Tuesday)
l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-04-30 (Thursday)
Target Build Ship date: 2009-05-05 (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.

Feedback required: Time needed for TB3 l10n release preparation?

2009-03-26T06:08:00.000-07:00

The Thunderbird developers are currently discussing the potential schedule for localizers for the final release of Thunderbird 3, which is currently scheduled to be released somewhere in June or July.

The main issue currently is the overall string freeze date for TB3.

We currently do not have a good feeling on how many string-related changes might still be needed for the final TB3 release. So the question basically comes down to:

"How much time do you need at a minimum before the final release date?"

This question goes mostly to those of you, who have not been part of our alpha or beta releases so far and therefore have a large amountof missing and obsolete strings left. The localizations that are most affected by this are: Danish, English (UK), Gujarati, Macedonian, Mongolian, Slovenian, Turkish, Chinese (Traditional)

So we'd really like to hear from you guys!

But of course this question also affects all other locales, as we assume that you guys want to do a lot more internal and external QA work on your localizations than you did for the alpha or betareleases. So we'd like to hear from all other locales as well.

We'd really appreciate a broad feedback from the l10n community here. Please remember, that this is the first major release for pretty much everyone, who is currently in a leadership position in the TB community. So we really need your feedback to make a good decision.

Please direct all your feedback to the discussion of this matter in the l10n newsgroup. That will make it much easier to track all your feedback

On the road to 55 locales

2009-03-17T02:09:00.000-07:00

Seth recently blogged about Firefox reaching 70 supported locales. That's very impressive indeed.

So, some of you might ask, how is Thunderbird holding up?

The short answer: We're doing great!

The long answer: We're currently at 54 supported locales and are closing in on the 55th (Bengali). Within the last six months, we've added 10 locales:

Arabic
Estonian
Frisian
Galician
Indonesian
Icelandic
Albanian
Tamil
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

and more are on the way. If we manage to release Thunderbird 3 in all those 55 locales, we will have increased our locale outreach by 17 locales compared to Thunderbird 2.

This is really a critical pillar of Thunderbird's growth strategy, because it will enable us to compete with other mail applications in many parts of the World, where we couldn't compete before, because people could only download the English version.

I believe this also shows that the creation of Mozilla Messaging was a smart move, that has not only invigorated the mailnews developer community, but the localization community as well.

This wouldn't be possible without the drive and passion of all the individuals who are eager to translate Thunderbird into their native language. Thanks a lot, guys! We really appreciate your efforts!

Thunderbird 3 beta2 l10n post-mortem

2009-03-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

As the Thunderbird developers are planning a post-mortem meeting for the beta2 release tomorrow, I thought that maybe we can do the same here on the blog with an exclusive focus on l10n matters.

So I would be interested in what you thought of the release process from an l10n perspective.

What worked well?
What didn't work?
What can be improved?
What lessons have you learned?
What lessons do I need to learn as the l10n coordinator?

Please post your answers and suggestions as a comment here in the blog. Thanks for your support in this matter.

Accesskey improvements in the Thunderbird preferences window

2009-02-25T14:33:00.000-08:00

I just pushed a fix for bug 453256 to the comm-central repository.

What this fix does, is to take advantage of the fix for bug 143065, to make sure that the accesskeys that we use in the Display, Composition, Privacy, and Advanced prefpanes are now much more sane, than they used to.

Prior to this fix accesskeys were shared across all tabs, so that if Advanced/General used "A" for "Automatically..." then Advanced/Update couldn't use A as an accesskey. That resulted in a lot of inadequate accesskey choices.

So dear localizers: If you haven't already taken advantage of the fix for bug 143065, please do so now and improve your accesskey story in the Thunderbird preferences window.

Thunderbird 3 Beta2 l10n update

2009-02-23T01:42:00.000-08:00

We're in the last stages of the beta2 release cycle for Thunderbird 3, after some last minute l10n checkins. And the good news is that we have more and more locales on board. We will release beta2 in 43 languages, five more than what we achieved with beta1.

Looking back at the whole Thunderbird 3 release cycle, we see a steady increase:

Thunderbird 3 alpha1: 1 language
Thunderbird 3 alpha2: 12 languages
Thunderbird 3 alpha3: 28 languages
Thunderbird 3 beta1: 38 languages
Thunderbird 3 beta2: 43 languages

This is a great achievement, given that we released Thunderbird 2 with only 38 languages. I want to thank all our localizers for making this happen. I'm now pretty optimistic about breaking the 50 languages barrier in the final Thunderbird 3 release later this year.

Unfortunately we are missing three locales in the beta2 release that were included in the beta1 release, but hopefully we can pick those up again with our next release (beta3) or our final release.

All Thunderbird strings are now frozen for the beta2 release

2009-02-17T05:45:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to remind everyone that as of last night, Tuesday, February 17 at 23:59 PST, the firm code and string freeze went into effect. That means that all strings are now entirely frozen until we release Thunderbird 3 beta2.

As of now 28 locales have already opted-in to be part of this release. An additional 9 locales are green (meaning that they have no missing strings in their localization) on our l10n dashboard and will hopefully opt-in soon. Hopefully even more will follow so that Thunderbird 3 beta2 will be the largest release in terms of the number of localized versions ever.

If you want be part of this release, please opt-in in the corresponding opt-in thread in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.

One additional note to localizers:
Please take a close look at the status of your tinderbox (at http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Mozilla-l10n-locale where "locale" must be replaced with your locale code (e.g. es-ES or de). I've seen some locales having a red Windows tinderbox, because those locales didn't follow this change to our installer strings. Please check if this applies to you and make the necessary changes before opting-in.

Thunderbird 3 beta2 slushy string freeze in effect

2009-02-12T14:25:00.000-08:00

Some of you have probably already noticed, but for those who didn't:

Since Tuesday, 23:59 Pacific Time we're in the so-called slushy string freeze for TB3 beta2. "Slushy" in this context means that from that date on only string changes in blocker bugs will be accepted (and marked as late-l10n) until the firm string freeze next Tuesday, Feb 17 23:59 PST.

Unfortunately we screwed up a little bit shortly before the slushy string freeze date by committing some string-only patches. Something the introduction of the "slushy" period was intended to fix.

The downside of this is that some strings were introduced which might be hard to translate because the UI is still missing for those. The upside is, that because of that we don't have any more blockers left with a potential string impact, so the risk of late-l10n changes is pretty slim.

So please start your work now, if you did not already.

I'll also start an opt-in thread shortly in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup.

REMINDER: String freeze for Thunderbird 3 beta2 in four days

2009-02-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

Just as a heads up for everyone involved. We're getting nearer to our two proposed string freeze dates. The first date, the so-called "slushy string freeze" will be on Tuesday, February 10 23:59 pacific time. We hope to have all blocker bugs with string impact done by this date. I've talked with the Thunderbird developers about this and they have told me that they will make an effort to get all of those bugs done by next Tuesday.

There's a second line of defense as well, that being our firm string freeze on Tuesday, February 17 23:59 pacific time. All of the bugs with l10n impact that aren't fixed by then and any potential late-l10n bugs will have to be fixed by that date to make the release.

From that point on, localizers will have two full days until Thursday, February 19 23:59 pacific time to get their localization in shape and opt-in for the beta2 release. After that date, we will start with testing our candidate builds and hopefully release Thunderbird 3 beta2 on Tuesday, February 24.

We know that this is a tight schedule, so we believe it would be a sensible approach for all localizers to start working on the remaining missings strings after the "slushy string freeze" and not to wait with all the remaining until the firm freeze.

Let me know what your thoughts are on this.

New (and hopefully final) release schedule for Thunderbird 3 beta2

2009-01-28T13:56:00.000-08:00

We finally have release schedule for TB3 beta2 for you.

Here it is (All dates use time of 23:59 PST):

Slushy String freeze date: 2009-02-10 (Feb 10 2009)
Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-02-12 (Feb 12 2009)
Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-02-17 (Feb 17 2009)
l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-02-19 (Feb 19 2009)
Target Build Ship date: 2009-02-24 (Feb 24 2009)

As I said before, we've tried to emulate what the Firefox devs did for their beta2 release, as we got the impression that this worked pretty well.

The idea is to have all string-related work done by the slushy string freeze date and all other code-related work plus the late-string work by the slushy code freeze date. Late string changes will require an additional approval by our TB3 beta2 release driver Bryan Clark (clarkbw on IRC).

The firm freeze date would be for fixing remaining bugs and regressions found in the nightlies and the l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 date would be the last time by which we would accept changes in localizations.

Thunderbird drivers have also evaluated the current state of things and have decided to add another beta release (beta3) to the release schedule. A firm decision on a release date has not yet been made, but it is probably safe to say, that beta3 will be released somewhere between the end of March and the end of April.

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

[Update] Release schedule for Thunderbird 3 beta2

2009-01-22T13:54:00.000-08:00

I've gotten some feedback, that many European localizers will be at the FOSDEM 2009 conference during the proposed beta2 release crunch time. We've also looked at the list of the remaining blocker bugs for the Thunderbird 3 release.

And after careful consideration it has been decided, to postpone the release schedule for TB3 beta2 by a week or two. I can't give you exact dates right now, but hopefully I can give you those dates until the end of the week.

Release schedule for Thunderbird 3 beta2 ... and other stuff

2009-01-19T12:53:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to everyone!

I know that I've been awfully quiet on the state of things in the Thunderbird world. I'm sorry for that. I was trying to nail down some stuff (release scheduling, website l10n story of which I will talk more in a later post), which took longer than anticipated.

I want to inform you about our release schedule for the upcoming Thunderbird releases.

First of all the dates for the upcoming Thunderbird beta2 release:
- Slushy string freeze: January 29th (Thursday)
- Slushy code freeze: February 3rd (Tuesday)
- Firm code/string freeze: February 5th (Thursday)
- l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze: February 8th (Sunday)
- Gozer (our build engineer) starts the builds: February 9th (Monday)
We've tried to emulate what the Firefox devs did for their beta2 release, as we got the impression that this worked pretty well.

The idea is to have all string-related work done by the slushy string freeze date and all other code-related work plus the late-string work by the slushy code freeze date. Late string changes will require an additional approval by our TB3 beta2 release driver Bryan Clark (clarkbw on IRC).

The firm freeze date would be for fixing remaining bugs and regressions found in the nightlies and the l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 date would be the last time by which we would accept changes in localizations.
We know that this is a tough schedule and that this announcement comes pretty late. Therefore if significant objections are raised by you, we will reconsider this schedule and will discuss, whether this warrants a pushback of this schedule by one week.

Thunderbird drivers have also evaluated the current state of things
and have decided to add another beta release (beta3) to the release schedule. A firm decision on a release date has not yet been made, but it is probably safe to say, that beta3 will be released somewhere between the end of March and the end of April.

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

I've been tagged as well aka the "seven things"-disaster continues

2009-01-16T01:32:00.000-08:00

I had really hoped to escape the "seven things"-madness, but KaiRo aka Robert Kaiser thought otherwise and tagged me unmercifully. That means that I need to share seven things you may (not) know about me. You have been warned...

The rules:

Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post
Share seven facts about yourself in the post
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs
Let them know they’ve been tagged

The seven things you may (or may not) know about me:

My first computer was the legendary C64 (Commodore 64), which I got somewhere back in 1986 if I recall correctly. Damn, I'm getting old!
The longest period of uninterrupted game-playing I've ever had was 18 hours, playing Pirates! on that same C64.
I'm a die-hard fan of the Science-Fiction classic series Babylon 5, which I still regard as one of the best pieces of television ever.
Right now, I'm very much into the new Battlestar Galactica series, whose 2nd part of its 4th and final season will start today. Yay!
I've been an avid fan of J.R.R Tolkien's epic work "The Lord of the Rings", which I read for the first time at the age of 15 (15 years ago) and have read again each year since then.
I've wondered for a long time, why it is that mainly German, Polish and French people drive the Mozilla localization efforts, but haven't come to a conclusion yet.
My first contact with Mozilla was back in 2000, when I tried a beta release of the infamous Netscape 6 release. It's really a small wonder that I decided to stay in the community after working with that piece of garbage :-)

The poor souls that I'm tagging and need to continue this meme:

Rafael Ebron - Mozilla Messaging marketing guru, who needs to blog more
Bryan Clark - Mozilla Messaging UI guru, who needs to blog more
Clint Talbert - Firefox QA guru and Calendar developer, who needs to blog more
David Bienvenu - Mailnews guru, who really needs to blog more
Seth Bindernagel - Firefox l10n guru, who needs to blog more
Henrik Skupin - Firefox QA guru, who just got a new job
Dan Mosedale - best German-speaking American I've ever encountered

Number of strings to translate in Thunderbird or Lightning

2008-12-17T12:07:00.000-08:00

A question that often comes up with new localizers that want to localize Thunderbird or the Calendar products (Lightning and Sunbird) is "How many strings do I need to translate/localize?"

Finally I have the answer to that question and I'm posting it here, because

Someone else than me might be interested in the answer as well
I need a page that I can point people to

So for Thunderbird you need to translate 5749 strings (as of now).
For the Calendar products you need to translate 2065 strings (as of now).

That's really a lot and it really makes it that more impressive when you think about the great work that localizers are doing for our products.

Localized Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 1 RC builds available

2008-12-02T01:23:00.000-08:00

We have our very first Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate builds available. We will be testing these builds in the next few days and we would appreciate it, if you could test them as well.

The usual disclaimers apply - either backup your current profile, or create a new profile and run TB 3.0 Beta 1 RC1 against the new profile.

If you see real showstopper bugs, then please let me know ASAP and make sure that a bug is filed on that issue.

38 languages are part of Thunderbird beta1

2008-12-01T05:49:00.000-08:00

A little bit over three weeks ago, when I announced the string freeze planning for beta1, I said that I hoped that we could increase our number of supported locales for this release to 30 or maybe even (in the most optimistic case) to 35 locales.

Well, as of now 38 locales (including en-US) have opted in for the Thunderbird 3 beta1 release, thereby totally blowing away my expectations. This is notable, because already with beta1 we're just one locale short of what we had achieved with the Thunderbird 2 final release, which is currently supported by 39 locales (including en-US).

So thanks a lot to everyone in the l10n community. You guys rock!

String freeze in effect for Thunderbird 3 beta1 release

2008-11-15T06:34:00.000-08:00

As of midnight Pacific time yesterday (roughly six and a half hours ago) we're in string freeze for the Thunderbird 3 beta1 release.

This means that any l10n strings in the mail/ and editor/ui/ directories in the comm-central repository are now frozen. Since Firefox is also in string freeze for it 3.1 beta2 release right now the strings in browser/, dom/, netwerk/, security/manager/ and toolkit/ are frozen as well. So we don't need to worry about any breakage that might come from that front.

The code freeze for our beta 1 will be on Tuesday 18th November at 23:59 Pacific time. We'll cut the release sometime after that once we've had some baking. So this means basically that your locales should be ready by that date. I'll open up a opt-in thread for you guys as soon as the code freeze is in effect.

We will be having a test day for beta 1 soon, that will be covering the new features and checking for any significant regressions. More details coming soon.

Please check the dashboard for up-to-date information on the state of your locale. We also have l10n nightly builds available at the regular location.

Making life easier for new localizers

2008-11-12T03:23:00.000-08:00

When you look at recent posts in the Mozilla l10n space, sooner or later you'll find out that a lot of localizations only exist for Firefox, but not for the comm-central application Thunderbird, Sunbird or SeaMonkey. If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Firefox 3.1 currently has 65 localizations compared to 48 localizations for Thunderbird 3.0, 36 localizations for Sunbird 1.0 and 18 localizations for SeaMonkey 2.0.

This is not totally surprising, since Firefox has many more users and much more buzz than all three other applications combined. And even for locales that support more than just Firefox, Firefox is the natural leader in terms of localizer attention and status, because of its market share and popularity. This is nothing to complain about since people generally are more likely to work on something that makes a big difference and localizing Firefox into e.g. Vietnamese makes a much bigger difference than localizing Sunbird into Vietnamese instead.

For us in the Thunderbird/Sunbird/SeaMonkey communities this means that we need to adjust to this fact. To be more precise we need to make the actual localization for people as easy as possible, because when push comes to shove our apps will always come in second, third or fourth.

Most of us obviously can't help a new localizer with the basic translation parts, since in most cases we don't speak the language, but what can be done is to make all the other aspects of localizing a Mozilla application as easy and as less burdensome as possible. This means

reducing the bureaucracy around the l10n processes
providing better tools for localizers
communicating clearly and effectively with localizers
making sure, that localizers can concentrate on what they are good at, the actual translation/localization part

On the first item, I think we are doing pretty well, since we do not require nearly as many approvals, reviews, etc. from localizers as Firefox does. I hope we can continue to keep our processes lean as we grow our communities and get more more localizations.

The second item is very well covered by the growing l10n team at Mozilla Corporation. Especially Pike and Gandalf are currently doing great stuff in the tools space, that will make life easier for many localizers.

The third item is hard for me to comment on, since I'm doing the l10n communication for Thunderbird and Sunbird and it is hard to judge yourself. I haven't heard any complaints yet, but maybe I just missed it. I certainly hope that people will give me constructive feedback if I screw up.

On the last item, we made a few huge steps lately. For two weeks various people (including me) have done a script-based analysis of our codebase in search of unused strings. Unused strings are bad for new localizers, because you need time to translate them, which could be put to better use. We recently fixed three bugs or are in process of fixing them, which removed (or will remove) a total of 670 strings (219 for Thunderbird, 127 for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, 324 for SeaMonkey. This is a lot of stuff (for Thunderbird roughly 1/8 of all localizable strings) that a new localizer will no longer have to wade through.

[Reminder] Thunderbird 3 beta1 string freeze in eight days (2008-11-14)

2008-11-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

I want to remind everyone, that we're the string freeze for the Thunderbird 3 beta1 release is approaching fast. We will freeze our strings for the beta1 release on Friday, November 14.

For those of you, who do not try to keep up with our string changes on a daily basis, now is a good time to take a look at all the string changes that have happened lately.

The l10n dashboard should give you a good indication on which areas of your locale need the most work. Documentation of the dashboard is available.

What many of you will notice right away is, that we've worked hard on removing unused/obsolete strings in the last weeks. Removing all those strings from your localization is something that can already be done before the string freeze as we are not planning on bringing those strings back. I know that this cleanup work means additional work for you, but hopefully it will make things easier for new localizers signing up to work on Thunderbird l10n.

In our last pre-release (alpha3) we managed to release with 28 locales. I hope that we can increase this number in this pre-release to 30 or maybe even 35.

I really hope that you will surprise me :)

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask here, in the l10n newsgroup or in #l10n on IRC.

Updated l10n documentation for Thunderbird - please give feedback

2008-11-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

In the past few days, I have actively worked on adding content to and updating the existing content of the Thunderbird l10n documentation page.

I added/updated

a pointer to and an explanation of the l10n dashboard (as already mentioned yesterday)
a pointer to this blog
a pointer to an up-to-date release schedule, which includes the string freeze schedule
a description of the responsibilities of developers during a string freeze and when breaking the string freeze
a first draft of a locale tier structure (based on the Firefox l10n tier structure)
the link to the TB source code in comm-central

I would really appreciate some feedback on this page from the l10n community. What information do you need, that this page or the links provided on that page does not currently offer?

Right now, I know of two areas, which still need work or content:

the link to the devmo documentation at the top on how to localize Thunderbird links to outdated content (the old cvs world)
the page still lacks content for the localization of web content, that will be created for the final Thunderbird 3 release

If you have any suggestions, please post them here or directly work on the wiki. That's what it is for :)

Updates to the l10n dashboard

2008-11-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

A few weeks after we had initially set up an l10n dashboard for Thunderbird, Calendar and SeaMonkey localization, Axel Hecht (Pike) managed to import the Thunderbird, Calendar and SeaMonkey trees into the main l10n dashboard as well.

We have let these two dashboards run in parallel for the last few weeks, but in the end, it didn't make any sense to have two dashboards for the same thing. We have therefore retired the Mozilla Messaging l10n dashboard and redirected all calls to it to the mozilla.org l10n dashboard. Please use the mozilla.org dashboard exclusively from now on.

To make you more familiar with the various options, that the dashboard provides, I've written up a short guide to its various functions on the mozilla.org wiki. I'd appreciate feedback on this guide.

Meeting the European l10n community

2008-10-26T03:04:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here in Barcelona at MozCamp Europe 2008 with a lot of the European l10n Localization community and the more I talk to everyone, the more amazed I am of the passion and the energy that everyone has, when it comes to localize not just Firefox, but all the other applications (Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.) that are out there in the mozilla ecospace.

For example, I spoke with one localizer (I can't remember his locale anymore, as there are so many people I talk to here), who spoke about working on Sunbird, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Firefox in parallel and still having a day job to pay the bills, that I had to wonder, how people do all of that with a day that just has 24 hours :)

One never ceases to be amazed by this community!

Thunderbird 3 will be released later (no definitive date yet)

2008-10-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

Three days ago, I informed you that Thunderbird 3 beta1 had been renamed to Shredder alpha3. So yesterday we had a Thunderbird drivers meeting to discuss what this all means for the next pre-release (beta1) and the overall release planning.

The outcome of that discussion was, that the earlier plan of releasing a first TB3 release candidate into the wild at the end of January or early February can no longer be kept. There are basically two reasons for this:

Firefox 3.1 has been postponed to Mid-February 2009 and we don't want to release TB3 in the middle of THe Fx31 release frenzy

We're not as far along with feature work than anticipated

What this means for our localizers is, that we will release Thunderbird 3 no earlier than four weeks after Firefox 3.1 is shipped (so probably around the middle or the end of March 2009). The reason for this is that

we don't want to release during a time, when all of Mozilla Corporation's resources (build engineering, IT, etc.) are focussed on Firefox exclusively

we want to give localizers enough time to complete their localization work for Thunderbird and not make them choose between localizing Thunderbird 3 or localizing Firefox 3.1

I can't give you an exact date for our planned release date however, as that is still being discussed. Hopefully we will know more after our first beta release is out of the door.

Thunderbird 3 beta1 renamed to alpha3

2008-09-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have already noticed that the next Thunderbird pre-release will not be called beta1, but alpha3 (Source).

From a localizing perspective this does not much make much difference to how things were before this announcement. Everyone, who had a green dashboard as of a few hours earlier (IIRC it were 28 locales), will now be part of the alpha3 release instead of the beta1 release. Nothing will change here.

As for how this affects the overall release plan, this is still being discussed by the Thunderbird developers. I'll update you as soon as the dust clears up.

Work to be done for TB3 with an integrated Calendar

2008-09-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Most of you probably know by now, that one of the main goals for TB3 is the full integration of the Lightning calendar extension into the Thunderbird base product. What that means from a l10n perspective is, that every locale that has not supported Lightning until now, will have to translate all the Calendar-specific strings, to make it for TB3.

Fortunately, roughly 2/3 of all current Thunderbird locales are already there. I've set up a tracking sheet to track the progress on this front.

Let me know, if you need more information...

Thunderbird 3 beta1 code freeze in place - Please land your l10n changes soon

2008-09-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

Now that we're in code freeze for Thunderbird 3 beta1 and are finally nearing the beta1 release, I want our localizers to know that you guys can work on your localization until 23:59 Pacific Date Time (PDT) on Sunday 28th September. After that we will make a hard cut and release beta1 with all languages that are green on the dashboard at that time. Please let me know, if you have issues with this date/time.

Very Late l10n checkin - Automatic Synchronisation Progress String

2008-09-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

As mentioned previously, there is one more late-l10n checkin. The good news is that there are no more to go. The bug that Mark Banner (Standard8) just checked in is:

Bug 455812 (nsAutoSyncManager should expose a scriptable XPCOM interface to allow monitor background download operations)

This adds one string into mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/messenger.properties called "autosyncProgress".

It will be visible on the status bar when our new auto synchronization code for IMAP is working and downloading folders in the background.

Thunderbird late-l10n checkin for beta1 - Message Reader Pane

2008-09-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

We were hoping to avoid these for Thunderbird beta 1, however, we needed to add one string to Thunderbird, and are expecting to add several more strings in the next day or so.

The bug that Mark Banner (Standard8) checked in yesterday is:

Bug 455801 - Polish changes to message reader for b1

This adds one string into mail/locales/en-US/chrome/messenger/msgHdrViewOverlay.dtd called "showDetailsButton.label".

It is visible on the message reader pane, when you have collapsed the headers (using hide details).

We will ensure that details of the other string checkins are posted as soon as they happen (and they take place as soon as they can). If you want to take a look at them before they happen, they are bug 455812 and bug 455978.

More info on Thunderbird 3 beta 1

2008-09-17T14:16:00.000-07:00

As said earlier, here is some additional information:

Thunderbird 3 beta1 does not yet contain Lightning and does therefore not yet contain any calendar-related strings.

We've only frozen mail/ and editor/ui, we can't really ask core to freeze their strings especially with their beta coming up.

The code freeze date will be Tuesday 23rd September. We'll cut the release sometime after that once we've had some baking.

So this means basically that your locales should be ready by that date. Due to not being able to freeze core strings, we're going to be a bit flexible depending on the amount of changes core puts in. We'll see how it goes, and notify you as we move on, but the main target is Tuesday 23rd.

We now have http://l10n.mozillamessaging.com/dashboard/ available for localizers to use.

This is a temporary set up, and we're intending it will be merged back into the l10n.mozilla.org version at some stage. We don't know if it is fully working or not. It does seem to have updated since yesterday as some locales which were previously passing now have missing strings. Some links may also not work / point folks to the wrong places. If its a real problem (i.e. you can't get to certain data), let us know.

We have l10n nightly builds are available in the original location. Tinderboxes aren't reporting to the Mozilla-l10n-* trees yet, but we've asked our build guru gozer to fix that today.

Nightly builds don't have automatic updates yet. we'll be looking into it, but we don't know if its likely to happen before beta 1 is set up.

We welcome any feedback on the new features/strings. We'll be posting more on where to report to later.

Thunderbird 3 beta 1 string freeze now in effect

2008-09-17T04:12:00.000-07:00

As Mark Banner points out, Thunderbird is string-frozen for its beta 1 release as of 23:59 PDT yesterday. This means that any l10n strings in the mail/ and editor/ui directories in the comm-central repository are now frozen.

The code freeze for beta 1 will be on Tuesday 23rd September at 23:59 PDT.

There are a number of new features we landed just before the string freeze, some of these still need some polish, more details about them later.

We will be having a test day for beta 1 on Thursday 18th September. It will be covering the new features and checking for any significant regressions before we hit the code freeze date, more details coming soon.

Thunderbird 3 beta1 string freeze postponed by two weeks

2008-09-03T01:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Thunderbird developers decided to postpone the string freeze for TB beta1 by two weeks due to the large amount of string changes that are still scheduled to land. That means that the release schedule for Thunderbird 3 now looks like this:

Planned code freeze dates

  3.0b1               3.0b2               3.0rc1
====+===================+===================+===
2008-09-23         2008-11-18         2009-01-27

Planned string freeze dates:

  3.0b1               3.0b2               3.0rc1
====+===================+===================+===
2008-09-16         2008-11-11         2008-12-02

These are planning dates, which may be subject to change (as you've seen).

We still don't have any l10n builds for Thunderbird, but this is expected to change soon, now that the Firefox and SeaMonkey teams have done most of the work in this area already and we just need to copy what they've done :)

Slides from my "Localizing Thunderbird 3" summit presentation

2008-08-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

I've finally managed to upload the (few) slides from my "Localizing Thunderbird 3" session from the mozilla summit.

Enjoy!

Thunderbird 3 release schedule for localizers

2008-08-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

I've already posted this over in the l10n newsgroup, but it's probably still a good idea to post it here as well. The Thunderbird core development team has finalised the release
schedule for Thunderbird 3.

Planned code freeze dates:

    3.0b1               3.0b2               3.0rc1
  ====+===================+===================+===
  2008-09-09         2008-11-04         2009-01-13

Planned string freeze dates:

    3.0b1               3.0b2               3.0rc1
  ====+===================+===================+===
  2008-09-02         2008-10-28         2008-11-18

So this means, that we are planning to freeze the strings for the Thunderbird 3 beta releases one week before the code freeze date.

The overall string freeze for the final release is planned to happen two weeks after the beta2 code freeze (eight weeks before the planned RC1 code freeze) to give localizers enough time to get your locales in shape.

Two additional notes:

These are planning dates, which may be subject to change and are not set in stone. From experience that mostly means that it may happen that the code freeze and string freeze dates get pushed back a few days or weeks. If this happens, I'll post here you as soon as I hear about it.

There are currently no l10n tinderboxen for the Thunderbird trunk, due to the move of Thunderbird code to comm-central and the creation of an hg l10n repository. We hope to have this fixed soon. The progress can be tracked in bug 449202.

Welcome to the Thunderbird Localization blog

2008-08-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Many of you, who were on the Mozilla Summit already know this, but for those who don't:

After discussion this with Mozilla Messaging's CEO David Ascher and Axel Hecht we have decided that I will be taking responsibility for the coordination of Thunderbird's localization efforts.

That means that from now on, I will be the guy that will communicate to you important stuff like release schedules (more on that in a later post), string freezes, etc. I'll also be doing Thunderbird-related approvals for locales and the related work.

For those, who don't know me yet. I'm a German and have until now already done the l10n coordination work for the Calendar Project and its two applications (Sunbird and the Lightning extension).

Axel, will help me get settled in and will put more focus on his current responsibilities on the technical side (e.g. l10n tools work) and his Firefox-related efforts.

I look forward to working with you guys. If you have any questions or items that you would like to discuss, please add your comments :)