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# Thunderbird Cross-channel
Thunderbird is localized with "cross-channel", a process developed for Firefox
to keep all localized strings in a single repository for all release channels.
documentation is a good reference, and this document will only discuss the
differences for Thunderbird.
## comm-l10n and comm-strings-quarantine
Firefox has "gecko-strings". Thunderbird has [comm-l10n](https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/comm-l10n).
Firefox has "gecko-strings-quarantine". Thunderbird has [comm-strings-quarantine](https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/comm-strings-quarantine/).
The cron job that updates comm-strings-quarantine runs on comm-central and uses
the same script as Firefox, with a slightly different configuration.
### quarantine-to-strings
After the string review, comm-l10n is updated with the latest commits to
comm-strings-quarantine. This is handled by a mach command, run twice:
```bash
mach tb-l10n-quarantine-to-strings --quarantine-path quarantine --comm-l10n-path comm-l10n clean prep migrate
mach tb-l10n-quarantine-to-strings --quarantine-path quarantine --comm-l10n-path comm-l10n push
```
As the quarantine repo does not have subdirectories for each locale, some
Mercurial magic is used to handle the path rewriting.
The last converted revision of comm-strings-quarantine is saved in an extra
metadata field in comm-l10n by `hg convert`. That revision's first child
is the next one to convert. A splicemap is written to splice it onto the tip of
comm-l10n. A filemap file is also used to rewrite the paths into `en-US`.
The resulting `hg convert` command looks like:
```bash
hg convert \
--config convert.hg.saverev=True \
--config convert.hg.sourcename=comm-strings-quarantine \
--config convert.hg.revs=5ee85b7de10c0acb3281d2fa4ade3104833f313d:tip \
--filemap /tmp/filemaps5axhbzd.txt \
--splicemap /tmp/splicemaprr2tqrk2.txt \
--datesort \
/tmp/quarantine \
/tmp/comm-l10n
```
Using Mercurial's extra metadata fields to save the commit information allows
for maintaining state information without needing a separate metadata file
stored somewhere.
## Monorepo
**comm-l10n** is a monorepo that includes the source (en-US) strings as well
as the target languages.
## L10n Repackaging during Release Promotion
As Thunderbird uses strings from Gecko Toolkit, it's necessary to pull those
strings from l10n-central and combine them with comm-l10n to produce a localized
build.
In automation, this is done in two steps. A `l10n-pre` job gets all of the strings
from all locales from the l10n-central repositories and comm-l10n and produces
a tar file, `strings_all.tar.xz`. The L10n repackage jobs use that file rather
than cloning from l10n-central. `strings_all.tar.xz` is also uploaded to the
FTP archive along with the source code tar file for use by downstream packagers.
For local development, `mach build installers-$AB_CD` and `./mach build langpack-$AB_CD`
will do the same combining of string sources as above in one step.
In both cases, the comm-l10n changset used is the one in `comm/mail/locales/l10n-changesets.json`
and the l10n-central revisions are taken from `browser/locales/l10n-changesets.json`.