"Source L10n" Available For SeaMonkey Trunk

I'm proud to announce to SeaMonkey localizers that the suite is ready to start into the world of so-called "source L10n", i.e. building localized builds based of files that are all available in our public repositories.

With that, the development trunk of SeaMonkey, which is in a pre-Alpha state for a future SeaMonkey 2, will be localizable using the Core L10n files that are already in CVS. with additional SeaMonkey-specific files added in the suite/ subdirectory and some in the editor/ui/ subdirectory of the respective language directories in the l10n/ CVS repository.

If the SeaMonkey localizer for a language has already CVS access and he is the locale owner or gets authorization from the owner, and if a Firefox localization is already present (and therefore the "core", i.e. dom/, netwerk/, security/ and toolkit/, as well as extensions/reporter are already present for their localization), he can add the SeaMonkey-specific files to the L10n CVS right away. Else, the locale owner or a peer that already has CVS access can do the checkins, and the SeaMonkey localizer should file a bug for CVS access and let the locale owner vouch for him. In any case, the core as mentioned above should be in the tree first. If no core localization is present yet, please follow the Firefox rules for getting the core L10n files in first.

Once your localization gets complete (check that with compare-locales), please file a bug for adding your locale to all-locales for SeaMonkey (in "Mozilla Application Suite > Build Config") and assign it to "kairo@" so I can add you there and repackaging of nightlies will be done.

We don't need any special reviews for bookmarks, start pages or search engines at the moment as we have no special agreements with any providers of such resources. You probably should keep the existing default bookmarks unchanged though, possibly adding a small (!) selection of localized ones - not without asking the link targets if they are OK with that, though.
You also should only change any URLs we point to if you really know what you are doing and have ensured that the target can handle the amount of traffic generated by this change and you are allowed to use any brand that might occur in SeaMonkey due to your changes. This is true for bookmarks, stage pages and search engines as well as any other URLs in SeaMonkey. Be careful with all of those!

For the technical side of search plugins, the only file you need to have in that dir is the list.txt file, please do NOT copy the en-US plugins themselves, if the list.txt points to a plugin not existing in your locale but in en-US, the plugin from en-US will be packaged automatically. If you add plugins for local search providers, you need to add the base name of the files in list.txt and provide a .src and .png file for the search plugin, using the "old" sherlock format as used by mycroft.mozdev.org. Note that all icons need to be PNG, not GIF or something else, as our localization process only picks up .png files.

As we are still in pre-Alpha with this SeaMonkey development cycle, we have not yet figured out exactly how we will deal with releases, I hope I can give a better picture of that when we are nearing Alpha. What we know, as that we'll probably go into the final localization freeze for or shortly after Beta, but we don't know yet when this will exactly be.

Once a locale has been added to all-locales, you'll notice the SeaMonkey nightly build machines appearing on the respective Mozilla-l10n-* tinderbox waterfall page and nightly builds generated when those columns there are green. Those nightly builds will appear in the latest-trunk FTP directory and should be usable to a big part.

Warning: We know of some features that are still broken in localized builds at the moment, those are all marked as dependencies of the source L10n bug: Download manager and password manager windows do not work, as well as system integration hooks (on Windows) - we are working on replacing the old implementations of those with newer ones and therefore did not enable the old code to work with source L10n.

I hope we can improve quality and availability of SeaMonkey localizations with this step, so that SeaMonkey 2 will be an even better suite product than any other such all-in-one application before.