Automating the Language Pack refresh process
Automating the Language Pack refresh process to ensure quality translations, enabling upstream and Ubuntu to easily push fixes, especially for LTS releases. Right now delta language pack updates are automatically uploaded to either a PPA for stable releases or directly into the archive. That works well for those, but full updates need to be built manually. It'd be good to remove any manual steps, but I'm not yet sure how.
- Martin Pitt knows the infrastructure best, but he's currently
working on other areas.
There are 2 kinds of LangPack Updates cases:
The building of langpack updates is already mostly automated:
- For the development release, updated language packs are released
twice a week. For saucy, this will happen after we've opened
translations in Launchpad after UDS
-For the most recent stables the packages land
in https:/
they are (supposed to be) copied to stable-proposed for each testing
round; that hasn't actually happened for a while, though. The only
thing that I do manually is a full -base rebuild, as that needs to be
coordinated with Launchpad. For stable releases, the plan is to release updates of language packs regularly. As stated, this has not been working well indeed, and it'd be good to discuss the way forward at UDS.
Methodology
- All the scripts and cron jobs to build langpacks are in
lp:langpack-o-matic, and this is the user documentation:
http://
- Testing is the main blocker in getting langpack updates out there.
It'd be nice to provide automated tests for langpacks, but I'm not
sure which technology we could use. In any case, an improvement that
could already be made would be to add the language packs into the ISO
tracker for people to run the current manual tests there.
- In terms of testing, that currently happens manually. We expect
testers to install the latest packages, then reboot, verify that the
desktop still starts and looks "correct", and that you can run some
critical pieces of software which would allow us to supply another
update with a fix. In particular, update-manager, update-notifier, and
software-center. This can be automated with autopilot up to some
degree, but that hasn't happened so far.
