How Migrations Are Run on l10n Repositories

Once a patch including new FTL strings and a migration recipe lands in mozilla-central, l10n-drivers will perform a series of actions to migrate strings in all 100+ localization repositories:

  • New Fluent strings land in mozilla-central, together with a migration recipe.

  • New strings are added to gecko-strings-quarantine, a unified repository including strings for all shipping versions of Firefox, and used as a buffer before exposing strings to localizers.

  • Migration recipes are run against all l10n repositories, migrating strings from old to new files, and storing them in VCS.

  • New en-US strings are pushed to the official gecko-strings repository used by localization tools, and exposed to all localizers.

Migration recipes could be run again within a release cycle, in order to migrate translations for legacy strings added after the first run. They’re usually removed from mozilla-central within 2 cycles, e.g. a migration recipe created for Firefox 59 would be removed when Firefox 61 is available in Nightly.

Tip

A script to run migrations on all l10n repositories is available in this repository, automating part of the steps described for manual testing, and it could be adapted to local testing.