Packaging and l10n repacks in particular continue to be a major thorn in
our collective side. Their implementation constitutes a significant
barrier to making builds and automation faster. I think it would be
awesome if all the cooks could get together in Portland and bang out an
ideal end state for packaging/l10n of Firefox. We would strive to
produce a set of milestones for attaining real wins in 2015 or 2016.
Here are the people I think are most relevant:
* glandium
* mshal
* catlee
* jlund
* nalexander
* axel (or someone else who knows Firefox l10n processes and systems)
* (maybe) ted (for historical context)
I think most (all?) of us are in the Platform group, so we should all be
in the same location. Should we set aside a few hours one day to
collectively commit to a path forward?
====
For reference, here is a partial list of things that are broken or
inefficient:
* jar.mn files aren't processed efficiently as part of the build (we
process them every build and this isn't a no-op). (jar.mn files are used
to define l10n files)
* The Makefile hackery for nearly everything packaging and l10n related
is eye-gouging bad. See mozapps/installer/packager.mk and
toolkit/locales/Makefile.in if you dare. There is essentially a shadow
build system related to packaging and l10n repacks that makes optimizing
or changing things extremely difficult.
* Testing around packaging and l10n is horrible to non-existent. l10n
jobs can break and we won't find out until a train uplift.
* Separate automation jobs per locale can be grossly inefficient,
slowing down the time it takes to produce a release (possibly a
chemspill) and wasting infrastructure in the process.
* There are gazillions of l10n repositories on hg.mozilla.org. I think
there is potential for consolidation.
* Very little developer visibility and understanding of how packaging
works, especially l10n packaging (although I think this is getting
better with code moving in tree).
* Some have questioned the necessity of multi-locale or single-locale
packages on certain platforms (notably Android - Nick knows more).
Essentially, packaging and l10n is turtles all the way down. I don't
think anybody who has worked with these systems wouldn't throw gasoline
on and torch things if given the opportunity. Let's plan a bonfire.
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