Firefox:L10n Sign-Off

This page is to be considered one of an evolving set of pages describing the Firefox release process, at least as far as localizations are concerned. It's focused on the general idea behind the sign-off, any item listed can be filled with lots of additional detail, and is in real life. This is just short enough to actually read it.

When releasing a new version of Firefox, Mozilla wants to be sure that we're not releasing locales that haven't finished the localization process. Users have high expectations on Firefox, and we want all our versions to live up to those.

New releases

Not being done comes in two variants, the first, and easy, one is that a localization team has open bugs which it considers to be bad enough to not ship. If you have a known bug in your localization and you're not sure if it's just a bug or a bad-enough bug, make sure it's filed in bugzilla, and CC folks for input.

The other variant is a bug that the team does not yet know about.

Thus, in order to sign-off, localization teams should spend some time to think about the status on the following items:

Functionality 

Does the browser install, start up, do all dialogs show? Make sure that you didn't forget any XML parsing errors or the like, our tools don't catch all of them. You want to check accesskeys and commandkeys, too.

Translation coverage 

Is all of the user interface translated? Product feature names and other English tech terms commonly used in your language excluded, of course.

In-product web links 

Did you test all in-product pages, are there any Page not Found errors? Did you submit localized content for those pages, and is it live?

Exposed services 

Do all bookmarks work as intended, do the search plugins work, are the feed reader services OK and working?

Help content 

The localization of the shipped help is optional, nevertheless should the shipped help be of good use for your users. Make sure that help is functional, and that entry points from the app into help work.

It's a good practice to run the litmus tests to help in the functionality testing and in the translation coverage.

When signing off, be aware that no software is ever bug-free. You may make the decision to ship with a few known bugs, but you should make a conscious decision here, and document that. Please file bugs in the mozilla bug database on those bugs, and target them at an upcoming release.

Updates

When doing minor updates, your locale may or may not have changed. If your locale has not changed, we will ship it without an explicit new sign-off, as the user will not get any worse product, but will get security updates.

When your locale changes between two releases on a stable branch, this needs to be tracked via bugzilla. Please make sure that you checked in all your approved bugs, as soon as possible and before the tree lock-down. Test upcoming nightly builds, and verify your fixes.

Apply the overall scheme for new releases on your updated locale, and sign it off as appropriate. When everything has been done right, and in a timely manner, you shouldn't find a reason to not sign off. Any of those should have been discovered in the testing of the nightlies.