Localization (l10n)¶

Single-locale language repacks¶

To save on build time, the build system and automation collaborate to allow downloading a packaged en-US Firefox, performing some locale-specific post-processing, and re-packaging a locale-specific Firefox. Such artifacts are termed “single-locale language repacks”. There is another concept of a “multi-locale language build”, which is more like a regular build and less like a re-packaging post-processing step.

Instructions for single-locale repacks for developers¶

This assumes that $AB_CD is the locale you want to repack with; I tested with “ar” and “en-GB”.

You must have a built and packaged object directory, or a pre-built en-US package.
```
./mach build
./mach package
```
Repackage using the locale-specific changes.
```
./mach build installers-$AB_CD
```

You should find a re-packaged build at OBJDIR/dist/, and a runnable binary in OBJDIR/dist/l10n-stage/. The installers target runs quite a few things for you, including getting the repository for the requested locale from https://hg.mozilla.org/l10n-central/. It will clone them into ~/.mozbuild/l10n-central. If you have an existing repository there, you may want to occasionally update that via hg pull -u. If you prefer to have the l10n repositories at a different location on your disk, you can point to the directory via

ac_add_options --with-l10n-base=/make/this/a/absolute/path

Instructions for multi-locale builds¶

If you want to create a single build with mutliple locales, you will do

Create a build and package
```
./mach build
./mach package
```

For each locale you want to include in the build:

export MOZ_CHROME_MULTILOCALE="de it zh-TW"
for AB_CD in $MOZ_CHROME_MULTILOCALE; do
   ./mach build chrome-$AB_CD
done

Create the multilingual package:
```
AB_CD=multi ./mach package
```

This currently only works for Firefox for Android.