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[Goofy]

This topic is dedicated to discussion and maybe realization of the idea as initially displayed here
http://babelwiki.babelzilla.org/index.php?...testing_machine

I am glad to say that this dream may have a little chance to come to reality, since I received encouraging feedback from Davide Ficano (dafi) and Martijn Kooij (Captain Caveman) not to mention Fenian himself. Of course it is certainly a huge work and I don't expect it can be done as quickly as an extension.

I paste here some significant observations. Everyone is welcome to comment, suggest, and why not, contribute


From dafi

what you say can be easily done (at least 90%) directly on BZ using the scripts I've written to parse install.rdf, it is easy to add support for chrome.manifest.
I can try to develop a webapp, I'm not sure developing an extension is the correct way, in this case a server side application sound better.

From Captain Caveman

Practically:
In my oh so humble opinion this would be a bad idea. Because it puts the responsibility of a good localization away from the localizer into the hands of the developer. So if at all, it would seem better to create an automated way for a localizer to test his/her own work. And since a localizer should already feel responsible to test his own work, I don't think this process can be made any easier for him/her.

Theoretically:
- I think a prerequisite must be some extension being installed in the testing Firefox to make a couple of things easier (installing addons, reporting problems)
- An application (either web/client) could process the xpi, and parse the required information as needed, that should as Davide said, not be the hard part.
- The application could start Firefox with a command parameter indicating the extension to be installed, our pre installed helper extension would then capture this parameter and install the extension indicated, writes an install succeeded message in a logfile the main application monitors, and closes Firefox.
- Next the application would start Firefox with the command parameter -UILocale and so setting the correct locale to test.
- Our helper extension could check for errors in the console (Firefox 3 only?), report these errors or a test succeeded message in the logfile, and closes Firefox again.
- The main application (which was monitoring the logfile) processes the result, and continues accordingly.

But that quite a lot of work I think...

[DaveG]

Writing an extension to sanity check another extension's locale files shouldn't be too hard. Automating the setup of each sounds a bit overkill though. I think that it could test the whole set at once and then the users could check the actual showing of each locale themselves.

While I do agree that the server-side scripts should be doing some of this, an extension makes sense for translators to test their addition of their locale for their own purposes.