Cross-channel Content

When creating the actual content, there’s a number of questions to answer.

1. Where to take content from?

2. Which content to take?

3. Where to put the content?

4. What to put into each file?

Content Sources

The content of each revision in gecko-strings corresponds to a given revision in each original repository. For example, we could have

Repository	Revision
mozilla-central	4c92802939c1
mozilla-beta	ace4081e8200
mozilla-release	2cf08fbb92b2
mozilla-esr68	2cf9e0c91d51
comm-central	3f3fc2c0d804
comm-beta	f95a6f4408a3
comm-release	dc2694f035fa
comm-esr68	d05d4d87d25c

The assumption is that there’s no content that’s shared between mozilla-* and comm-*, so we can just convert one repository and its branches at a time.

Covered Content

Which content is included in gecko-strings is controlled by the project configurations of each product, on each branch. Currently, those are browser/locales/l10n.toml and mobile/android/locales/l10n.toml in mozilla-central.

Created Content Structure

The created content is laid out in the directory in the same structure as the files in l10n-central. The localizable files end up like this:

browser/
  browser/
    browser.ftl
chrome/
  browser.properties
toolkit/
  toolkit/
    about/aboutAbout.ftl

This matches the file locations in mozilla-central with the locales/en-US part dropped.

The project configuration files are also converted and added to the created file structure. As they’re commonly in the locales folder which we strip, they’re added to the dedicated _configs folder.

$ ls _configs
browser.toml   devtools-client.toml  devtools-shared.toml
mobile-android.toml  toolkit.toml

L10n File Contents

Let’s assume we have a file to localize in several revisions with different content.

ID	central	beta	release
a	one	one	one
b		two	two
c	three
d	four	old	old

The algorithm then creates content, taking localizable values from the left-most branch, where central overrides beta, and beta overrides release. This creates content as follows:

ID	content
a	one
b	two
c	three
d	four

If a file doesn’t exist in one of the revisions, that revision is dropped from the content generation for this particular file.

Note

The example of the forth string here highlights the impact that changing an existing string has. We ship one translation of four to central, beta, and release. That’s only a good idea if it doesn’t matter which of the two versions of the English copy got translated.

Project configurations

The TOML files for project configuration are processed, but not unified across branches at this point.

Note

The content of the -central branch determines what’s localized from gecko-strings. Thus that TOML file needs to include all directories across all branches for now. Removing entries requires that the content is obsolete on all branches in cross-channel.