Mozilla en version française

Withdrawal

Cédric Corazza — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:20:00 +0200

I've been thinking for a few days about the discussions and decisions made about the Mozilla code of conduct and my commitment to the Mozilla Project.
An American societal debate has been brought by a few people into a ground where it should not have to: into the Mozilla Project, really far from the Mozilla Manifesto. In my opinion, using Mozilla as a tribune, in someway holding the community to ransom —though I can understand and support their claims— is at best intellectually dishonest.
These claims and debate should have remained where they belong to: inside the corporation, or in the civil society.
Furthermore, still according to me, the Mozilla leaders accepted this situation.
It's the last straw for me, after some other disappointments during these last 9 years of contribution.
I'm sad about this, but I can't contribute anymore, so I'm withdrawing from this project.
Live long and prosper.

Cédric.

Think Global, Act…

goofy — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:07:00 +0200

This is an attempt by the Frenchmozilla team to translate this original blog post by Clochix. (1).

Tonight I realize that I have been wrong for a long time when introducing Mozilla as an organization of friendly hippies whose mission is to make the Web better. My bad. Mozilla's mission is not to make the Web better but to make people's lives better. The Web is just the mean used by the Foundation to reach this goal.

The Web is an immense wasteland that Mozilla want to help us live in comfortably. It does so by providing tools to cultivate this land and teaching us how to use these tools. The mission of the Foundation and its value are global, you can agree with them whatever your culture is, I think. But even if we can easily agree on this universal goal, the means to reach it are much more complicated.

During its pionneer years, Mozilla mainly chose a technical path, creating tools. A domain where there are few cultural peculiarities that interfere. You can still debate on what would be more appropriate to forge, a shovel, a spade or a digging shovel. But this would be more personal choice than collective history.

Nowadays we have a set of tools at hand, so it is time to go to the next level: learn how to use them and invent new usages. This is where things start becoming complicated. The issues involved go beyond technical questions and are starting to shift into to social and cultural interactions. We are drifting away from the universal towards an area where there are multiple points of view, depending on the social and cultural environment in which members of the community have grown up in and come from. It is much more difficult to communicate with everyone using one common language. During the past few months I happened to notice 2 examples clearly showing this problem. Two cases where, though I understand and agree with the stated goal, I feel uneasy with the proposed way of achieving it.

The first one is the influence of the North American variant of scoutism on Mozilla. Mitchell Baker recently mentioned how she has been influenced by being one Girl Scout of the United States when younger. Mark Surman, another key person of the Foundation, has just suggested that Mozilla could help and create a Webscouts movement.

This is not only verbal assumption. OpenBadges, which is the key project for Mozilla investment in education, is directly inspired by the badges given as rewards by some scouts movements to testify one acquired ability or another. Unfortunately, the badge concept and its link to education seems to me very hard to explain to the French-speaking people I happen to discuss with. The basics of Scout culture are probably less known in French society as a whole. It may not be relevant to use this reference as inspiring.

That's Mark Surman, again, who made me think about this second case, talking about the possibility to use the generic name of "Web Makers", to name the support program for creation on the web. That's a concept Mark introduced last year and which is inspired directly from the "makers" movement, a very active group in the USA since a long time.

Mark also refers to the peculiar ethics of the adepts of this movement, willing to transpose it to the Web. But, this movement is almost invisible in France, or it has neither the form nor the impact of the one in the US. And about makers ethics…

How, then, could we be able to explain what Mozilla wants to do, talking about WebMakers? There isn't any French word to address this concept, how could we explain something we don't even know how to name?

All that tends to make me wonder whether Mozilla should not include a touch of relativism in its plans. Yes, it is crucial to teach the Web, yes again, creation on the Web must be enhanced and supported, I assume everyone belonging to the community agrees on these points. But the way to achieve these goals may not be the same everywhere. Some analogies here will be clear enlightment, but there would possibly obscure things. I don't like cultural revolution when decided from the above. Maybe each local community, with the support of Mozilla Foundation, should try and grasp these questions of education to the Web and Web creation, and try and solve issues matching local context. Wait a minute, wouldn't it be a refreshed version of the famous motto by René Dubos "Think Global, Act Local"?

What do you think?

---

(1) Yes, it is Mozilla-related and CoC (whatever) compliant. This blogpost has been certified discrimination-free by our most respected B.O.R.E (Board Of Respect Evaluators)

Mozilla IT and Community

Cédric Corazza — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 18:31:00 +0200

Matthew announced a few weeks ago his new goals for 2012 about Mozilla IT & Growing Community.
So we jumped at the chance to gather all our local websites, blogs, wikis, mailing-lists, bots, etc. into a single hosting. This allowed us to have more sysadmin resources available when needed, to have a more powerful server which can process in a snap all the actions needed to update the 100 locales hosted for the transvision tool for release, beta, aurora and central branches without overloading our server.
Thanks to this, we could also get rid of Adsense on frenchmozilla.org site, which was used to pay our hosting provider, and we used the occasion of the moving to refresh the design of our ten-year old website.
So thanks Matthew for your initiative.
Next step for us, merging all of our local sites into a single point of entry/portal.

About governance

filip — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:00:00 +0200

Version française

Lots of things are happening at the moment in Mozilla galaxy. I could of course tell a word about recent controversial debates around the rapid release cycle, or about dropping the http protocol and version number display, but even though I find these propositions treating the final user as a child and opposed to my perception of the Manifesto, this is not the point here. I would rather deal about erratic relationship between Mozilla Corporation (let’s call it governance since the word is trendy), decision-makers, employees and volunteer contributors (whether they are localizers, codehackers or evangelists).

Describing these relationships just now as confrontational would be quite an understatement. Let me illustrate my point with recent defections of talented and enthusiast contributors.

Cédric, for example, in a recent blog post announced his decision to stop contributing to the Firefox localization. It’s a hard blow to our team, but I fully understand his position. For those who don’t know, Cédric is not only a simple contributor, it’s basically thanks to him that you can download Firefox in French. He’s previously translated in real time all the last Firefox versions, as well as many promotional web pages or release notes on the Mozilla websites. He’s also the only translator for Bugzilla and managing KompoZer’s localization.

There has been many crises in the past, one can remember the though process of dropping the Mozilla suite, or the fact that we’re not anymore allowed to choose default bookmarks, but these are only examples. There has always been a part of defiance from some active communities facing Mozilla’s governance. For instance, this very blog is totally independent from Mozilla, which allows us to speak freely. That only reinforces our choice.

As contributors, we’ve never really been totally heard by Mozilla, and I’m not talking about specific cases here (there really is a good relationship between us and some people from the organization), but more like a general feeling. In the past, we’ve let things go, because there was a fair tradeoff between unsatisfying choices and other advantages.

I personally was also on the verge of dropping out, which I did not for several reasons, a prominent one being excellent partnership and friendship between local communities. But I gradually took some distance with products localization efforts (professional and family life being also at stake), focusing on admin tasks and some translation help tools, which is probably the reason why I am still here.

But right now there is a widening gap between volunteers contributors and Mozilla. We enjoy reading Mitchell’s recent posts, we share her vision and agree with Mozilla Manifesto, but some other choices, decisions or behaviours do not give us strength and courage to go on.

We are not Calimero™-like people but I feel that we volunteer contributors should deserve more respect. For that matter and without ludicrous pretention, if Mozilla is still alive and well and its products are used worldwide, it ows very much to our work. I will not refer to some employees considering us as sidekicks on their strategy and treating us with disdain (this already happened for real) , because this was only a specific occasion — I am afraid things are more serious.

Just for giving one example, when we say that an LTS version is necessary, we’re saying it for several reasons. Not only is the localization work more demanding, but we’re also getting users complaints by email. What’s the answer to that? More or less nothing, mostly “that’s the way it is, but we’ll set up a discussion group and we’ll see what happens”…

So, yes, maybe a change of relationship is necessary, at least some consideration. We too can sometimes be right and give informed advice. We’re not only Mozilla fanboys that can be bought for a t-shirt (nor numbers).

I can understand that a Debian-style governance involving elections isn’t necessarily the best choice for the Mozilla project, but what about some communities representation in the Foundation or the Corporation? In any non-profit/school/faculty/business in France there are elected representatives for the students, teachers or employees, why couldn’t it be the case inside the Mozilla project? I’m not talking about a nice-looking seat, but someone (mmmh why not several) who really is a member of one of the comunities and who would be giving informed advice coming from other contributors.

Of course, I can imagine it’s not so easy to think about and set up, but why not having, besides the Manifesto, a Constitution discussed and written by all contributors, employees, managers and volunteers alike. (All together ?)

De la contribution

Cédric Corazza — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 21:29:00 +0200

English translation

Cela fait plusieurs semaines que je me pose des questions sur l’orientation du projet Mozilla, enfin, plus spécifiquement sur les décisions prises concernant Firefox.

Le récent changement du cycle de développement qui a bouleversé les habitudes de la communauté, les déclarations inconsidérées de certains responsables du projet ainsi que la décision de ne pas maintenir une version de Firefox dite LTS, autant pour les entreprises que pour les utilisateurs, telles sont les trois raisons majeures qui me font envisager un nouveau mode de contribution au projet Mozilla.

Certes, devant le lever de bouclier des administrateurs système des entreprises — et j’en fais partie — Mozilla a décidé de créer un « groupe de travail entreprise », qui n’est selon moi qu’un rideau de fumée. Le besoin est une version de Firefox LTS, à quoi bon créer un groupe de travail si ce n’est pour en arriver à : « Dites-moi ce dont vous avez besoin, je vous dirai comment vous en passer ». J’espère sincèrement me tromper.

Une autre source du malaise grandissant au sein de la communauté, est la croissance exponentielle du projet Mozilla, ce qui est une bonne chose en soi. Quand j’ai rejoint le projet en 2003, avant la sortie de Firefox 1.0, nous n’étions que quelques dizaines de contributeurs. Le projet recense maintenant des milliers de contributeurs, Firefox est utilisé par 30% des internautes, et la sensation, à tort ou à raison, des contributeurs de n’être que des pions dans le projet dont on prend les contributions mais dont on n’écoute pas les avis s’amplifie. Plusieurs contributeurs de plus ou moins longue date ont déjà quitté le projet et beaucoup d’autres, désorientés, se posent des questions.

Pour ma part, je ne déserterai pas totalement le projet, car je souscris au manifeste de Mozilla en beaucoup de points et j’estime que la Fondation Mozilla est indispensable à la bonne santé d’Internet, mais j’arrêterai toute contribution en ce qui concerne Firefox : le logiciel, les sites Web, les campagnes marketing.

Je me consacrerai à d’autres projet de Mozilla, plus communautaires et à l’écoute de leurs contributeurs de mon point de vue, comme Bugzilla, KompoZer, SeaMonkey ou encore Calendar.

Je m’octroie toutefois encore quelques semaines : si je ne percevais pas de signes tangibles d’amélioration, je cesserai à regret et définitivement toute contribution en ce qui concerne Firefox.

English translation

I have been wondering for several weeks about the trend of the Mozilla Project, well more specifically about the decisions taken regarding Firefox.

The recent change about the release cycle has overturned the community habits and the irresponsible statements of some Mozilla representatives as well as the decision not to support a Firefox LTS release, for companies or end-users, are the root of the new nature of my contribution to the project.

Indeed, facing the outcry of companies’ sysadmins — whom I’m part of — Mozilla decided to create an “Entreprise Working Group”, which is in my opinion only a smokescreen. The very need is a LTS release of Firefox, so what is the point to create a working group to speak about? “Tell me what you need and I will tell you how to dispense with it”? I sincerely hope to be wrong here.

Another root of the increasing discomfort within the community might be the exponential growth of the Mozilla Project, which is a good thing. When I joined the project in 2003, before the Firefox 1.0 release, we were a few dozens of contributors. The project is now gathering thousands of contributors, Firefox is now about 30% of browser market share, and the contributors’ feeling, rightly or wrongly, to be pawns in the project whose contributions are taken and opinions are ignored, is increasing. Several contributors have already resigned from the project, and several others, disoriented, are wondering.

For my part, I won’t desert totally the project, because I truly agree the Mozilla Manifesto and I think the Mozilla Foundation is indispensable for the good health of Internet, but I will stop contributing in anything related to Firefox: the product, the websites and the marketing campaigns.

I will focus on other Mozilla projects, which I feel more community aware and careful about their contributors, such as Bugzilla, KompoZer, SeaMonkey or Calendar.

Though, I shall wait and see a few weeks. If no tangible signs show up, sadly, I will definitely cease to contribute to anything regarding Firefox.

Cédric

New transvision glossary version and URL

filip — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:45:00 +0200

It has been quite a while since the last update of the Transvision glossary. I’m happy to share the new version with you.

The Transvision glossary is a web tool that permits you to search in the en-US or other language for words/sentences/entities and give you the en-US/locale correspondence. It can be useful to know how your team has translated some words or to search for mistakes.

You can also find some old information on the Babelzilla blogposts : Transvision is good for me and Transvision progress

Web Service

There is also a Web service which returns a JSON file instead of an HTML page : Glossaire Web service

To use it, you have to pass the argument directly on the URL as it is done on the regular glossary (look at the URL after a search) :

http://transvision.frenchmozilla.org/index.php?recherche=report&locale=fr&repo=beta

Will become in the Web service :

http://transvision.frenchmozilla.org/glossaire_webservice.php?recherche=report&locale=fr&repo=beta

New in this version

New and unique URL : http://transvision.frenchmozilla.org/,
You can search in the “Release”, “Beta”, “Aurora” and “Trunk” repositories,
You can switch your language directly on the web page,
The TMX files used in this version are now available.

Repositories and Channels

Behind the scene, the “Release” and “Beta” en-US repositories come directly from hg.mozilla.org, the “Aurora” and “Trunk” repositories come from the hg.mozilla.org.tr (thanks to them for the work). The repositories, the TMX files and the glossary are updated each night at 2.00AM (UT+2).

The code is in the hg repo.

Work in Progress

What is removed for now :

doublon/duplicate script (I’ll try to re-add it latter)
Alignment script, I’ll try to re-add it directly on the same page via an option
hg.frenchmozilla.org and hg-trunk.frenchmozilla.org are now inactive (I don’t think a lot of people used it anyway).

Future of this tool

Re-add alignment on the same page
Add a term to term automatic glossary
Re-add the duplicate search script
Treat the html in the glossary correctly
If there is a popular demand, compare not only the en-US to a locale, but also between locales (useful for language with more than one locale ?).

Feedbacks

Feel free to contact me (on this thread or by email) if you find any error/bug or if you think there is a feature missing.

As usual, I’m not an HTML guru nor a good designer, if someone feels that he can improve the design, go ahead That’s also true for the code.

Transvision/glossary and frenchmozilla mercurial following both 1.9.2 and trunk

filip — Sun, 16 May 2010 23:11:00 +0200

Some news about the Transvision scripts aka localisation glossaries.

On the Glossaire you’ll find the glossary for the 1.9.2 branch (comm, mozilla, mobile1.1 and various other directories).

On Glossary Trunk you’ll find the glossary for the trunk (comm, mozilla, mobile and various other directories).

For these two URLs, you’ll find a glossary, an alignment tool, a duplicate search (for the trunk, the cache will be updated tomorrow).

The results for the glossary are now highlighted and colours are used in the first column. You can now use regexp, *wildcard, make the search case sensitive, whole word only and search on the entity names.

In beta: you can also get the results of the glossary through a webservice (replace “fr” with your locale code).

with the same search options as Glossary (try a search on this page and look at the resulting URL). This part can be enhanced on demand.

As a side effect, we provide now two mercurial repositories which follows the 1.9.2 branch for all the products, and the trunk.

You can get information on how the Transvision tool can help you make a better localisation in reading the two messages from Goofy on the Babelzilla blog: Transvision Is Good For Me and Transvision Progress

This wiki page can also be interesting, but perhaps a little outdated.

For the French locale, I’ve also made a term to term glossary automatically.

This is done with Mathematica and takes some time (approximately one hour) to compute. It’s not perfectly accurate, but, if I have time, I’ll plan to enhance the calculations. From the localisation perspective, I don’t think it is really useful, but it was fun to hack. If someone from a different locale is interested in the results, I can make on demand a term to term glossary (expect time lag for the realisation).

I hope this will be useful for you.

Mercurial repository for l10n en-US files only from the frenchmozilla team

filip — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:24:00 +0200

Starting from the move to Mercurial, it's not possible to pull from the repository only the en-US files. With the help of the bind mount we have successfully made an hg repository with only the needed */locales/en-US/ files and directories. (11 Mo for the en-US files against more than 670 Mo for the whole repositories)

It is accessible from http://hg.frenchmozilla.fr (DNS servers may not be updated yet from your location). The en-US repositories are updated each 30 minutes and if the changes include en-US ones, they are synchronized in our repository (feeds are up-to-date).

Our repository watches the following directories at the moment :

browser
dom
editor
extensions
mail
netwerk
other-licenses
security
suite
toolkit

The mozilla-central, comm-central, and dom-inspector are included (mobile-browser is on its way). Note that since venkman and irc are not (yet ?) directly on the mozilla-central repository, it is also not in ours.

You can also clone our repository if you want with :

$ hg clone http://hg.frenchmozilla.fr/

The only thing I'm not happy with is that the original comment of the en-US commit is not reported to the hg.frenchmozilla.fr comment. I have some hints on how to make this, but it is not yet implemented (if someone wants to help, he is welcome).

####### Technical part, how it is done. #############

Firstly, I pulled the following 4 repositories :

$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/
$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/
$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mobile-browser/
$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/dom-inspector/

This gave me 4 directories.

For each en-US localizable directories, I reproduced the l10n scheme in a new L10N_EN-US directory: browser dom editor extensions mail network other-licenses security suite toolkit

For instance, for the browser directory : L10N-EN-US/browser/locales/en-US/

I "bind" mounted the en-US directories from the hg.mozilla.org repositories into my new directory. That gave me for the browser one, into the /etc/fstab file (in one line):

/srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/mozilla-central/browser/locales/en-US
/srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/L10N-EN-US/browser/locales/en-US none defaults,bind 0 0

When all the repositories are mounted, I created our mercurial repository with the command:

$ hg init
$ hg update

Here is the 30 minute cron scheduled script:

*************************************
#!/bin/bash

cd /srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/comm-central/
hg pull -u

cd /srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/mozilla-central/
hg pull -u

cd /srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/mobile-browser/
hg pull -u

cd /srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/dom-inspector/
hg pull -u

cd  /srv/d_frmoz/DONNEES/HG/L10N-EN-US/

hg addremove
hg diff > ../diff.tmp

if [ -s ../diff.tmp ]; then
 date=`date`
 suffix=$(date +%s)
 cp ../diff.tmp ../DIFF/diff_$suffix.txt
 rm -f ../diff.tmp
 hg commit -m "Automated commit @ $date"
fi

****************************************

This script pulls the changes from the hg.mozilla.org repositories and if there is a change in the en-US part, it commits it to our repository with a comment where the date is included (I need to find a way with hg log to put the original comment also).

The Mercurial server is then served with our local Apache server for the public.

Hope this will help other localizers.

How to localize Fennec 0.4 in your language

filip — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:00:00 +0200

Following the previous post about the French localization of Fennec 0.4 for Nokia n8X0, I'll try to explain how we did this.

Prerequies : you need a debian based system, debian, ubuntu, the tablet itself should work, in fact the really important piece of software is dpkg-deb.

Download Fennec 0.4 and Xulrunner 1.9.1a1pre : ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/dists/diablo/release/binary-armel/

Make 2 directories, one for Fennec one for Xulrunner.

Change to Fennec directory and unpack the debian packages:

dpkg-deb -e ../fennec_0.4_armel.deb .

dpkg-deb -b ../fennec_0.4_armel.deb .

You have now in your directory 3 directories DEBIAN, etc and usr.

Copy usr/local/fennec/chrome/en-US.jar in another directory where you can unzip it : unzip en-US.jar

You now have 5 files to localize : bookmarks.dtd, browser.dtd, browser.properties, hud.dtd, toolbar.dtd.

They are really short, and in general the strings already exist in your Firefox localization.

Remove en-US.jar from your directory and zip the newly localized file :

zip -r ab-AB.jar *

where ab-AB is your locale code.

Put your ab-AB.jar in usr/local/fennec/chrome/

Remove en-US.jar from usr/local/fennec/chrome/, and move en-US.manifest to ab-AB.manifest.

Edit ab-AB.manifest, change all en-US occurrences to ab-AB.

In your Fennec directory, rebuild the debian package :

dpkg-deb -b . ../fennec_0.4_armel.ab-AB.deb

Don't worry about the warning.

Et voilà, Fennec is localized in your language.

Now make the same for xulrunner.

Unpack the debian package:

dpkg-deb -e ../xulrunner_1.9.1a1pre_armel.deb .

dpkg-deb -b ../xulrunner_1.9.1a1pre_armel.deb .

In the case of xulrunner you have to make the DEBIAN directory yourself :

mkdir DEBIAN 
mv control md5sums postinst prerm DEBIAN

Take your ab-AB.jar from your firefox localization and unzip it : unzip ab-AB.jar.

Remove the reporter directory as it is not needed.

There is only one entity to change between the two versions : in the file mozapps/xpinstall/xpinstallconfirm.dtd change <!ENTITY warningMain.label to : <!ENTITY warningPrimary.label. That's all.

Re zip your ab-AB.jar : zip -r ab-AB.jar *

Put your ab-AB.jar in usr/local/xulrunner/chrome/

Remove en-US.jar from usr/local/xulrunner/chrome/, and move en-US.manifest to ab-AB.manifest.

Edit ab-AB.manifest, change all en-US occurrence to ab-AB.

In your Xulrunner directory, rebuild the debian package :

dpkg-deb -b . ../xulrunner_1.9.1a1pre_armel.ab-AB.deb

Don't worry about the warning.

Et voilà, xulrunner is localized in your language.

You now have two debian packages : xulrunner_1.9.1a1pre_armel.ab-AB.deb and fennec_0.4_armel.ab-AB.deb which you can install on your tablet.

Hope this will help.