- no fallback mechanism: If people would try to use some non-fitting locale packs, they get
crashes and XML errors because we have no fallback if lookup for
a locale string fails somewhere (string or file not found).
See bug 71797.
- XUL FastLoad problems: XUL FastLoad fails to update the strings
after a locale switch. There is a workaround in place (killing the FastLoad file),
which also fails sometimes, and was promised to be replaced by a fix for 1.1 final (!).
See bug 142623.
- Hardcoded content: Yes, there's still some hardcoded un-localizable code in UI files left,
a big part of this is low-hanging fruit for contributors and blocks L10n severily sometimes.
All relevant bugs (should) have the "L12y" keyword set.
Query for All bugs with L12y keyword set
(50 bugs found as of Thu Feb 19 18:26:44 PST 2004,
35 of them in [Seamonkey] Browser product,
13 of them in [Seamonkey] MailNews product,
1 of them ("Localize FE") in Firefox product,
0 of them in Thunderbird product,
the other one is in PSM).
- Ignorance: Still some programmers think "It works for me and my collegues, and so it's alright" -
and they forget about i18n issues or things like locale switching altogether.
I had to fix breakage of the locale switching pref panel four times from 2002-03-31 to 2002-08-26 -
the FastLoad workaround (see above) was the fith issue that broke it during that time span!
See CVS Log of the pref panel.
BTW, locale switching is now broken once again (even in 1.7a): See bug 235058.
- No stringbundles from non-privileged files: This started to hurt me when trying to make about:plugins
localizable (see bug 56863).
In fact, I had to give about:plugins full chrome privileges just to access stringbundles - this opened
a potential security issue though.
See bug 98298.
- Content packs: We should investigate if we really need seperate packages for that content,
as the real idea never took off (mainly Netscape had further plans with that).
Merging them back into normal localization content could ease a few things.
This should be some points to start for contributors who want to help us, and an overview what's bugging us
most currently. I'm sure the list is not complete, but it's what came to my mind when writing the slides...