Re: Source L10n for extensions (ChatZilla, venkman and others)

Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Rimas Kudelis wrote:
>> However, I really don't understand what the problem is in simply
>> packaging all available translations together with the extension, like
>> it is done with Lightning. Would anyone enlighten me on that?
> 
> It just gets _very_ huge if you have a bigger number of localizations.
> Lightning or DOMI could be sooo much smaller in download if they would 
> not need to do that.
> 
> And actually, I don't want to take the penalty of shipping every 
> available localizations to all users of SeaMonkey 2, as we already have 
> enough people complaining about the size of SeaMonkey 1.1.x as-is.
> My primary concern is still the suite, but I think it would be good to 
> be using more or less the same solution for both the in-suite extensions 
> and the separate XPIs.
> 
> Perhaps we can find a solution of installing both an extension and its 
> fitting language pack at once through AMO - I think that would be the 
> nicest solution.
> 
> Robert Kaiser
> 

"What he said."

The trade-off for adding all these localization is not trivial - for 
ChatZilla's jar file, the en-US locale is about 10-15% of the total 
jarfile. Which means if you add 10 or so locales, half the jar (and 
hence xpi) is localizations (90% of which the user will not need). 
That's not really reasonable.

Only installing some of them from one single download is not possible at 
this time, to my knowledge. While you can put multiple add-ons in one 
xpi, I don't think that the current add-ons UI lets you pick which of 
those you want to install, so doing that would not solve our problem. It 
is probably too late in the game for the 1.9 cycle to add UI for that. 
And besides, in those cases we would still need the separate 
l10n-specific xpi files which were proposed in my earlier post (so your 
idea could be a later addition to this).


As far as AMO is concerned - if we could find a solution for that stuff, 
that'd be great. I'm not sure how easy it would be - you would have to 
ask the AMO folks.

~ Gijs