My second project this summer was to generate Fennec desktop builds and l10n repacks. The purpose of doing desktop builds and repacks of the mobile browser is to help people localize Fennec without having to load a build on to the device manually. The output of these builds is in the latest-mobile-l10n directory on our ftp server. 
This is a screen capture of the browser showing the Chinese version of Google along with Larry showing us something. This is really neat to see Fennec in a totally different language and character set.
Another screen capture showing the localized Fennec bookmark manager. I am a little curious as to why there appears to be Spanish text in the Chinese localization.
Currently, only Linux builds occur but the factories that were written should work for Windows and Mac OS X just fine. I found that this project went very smoothly with a couple small-ish exceptions. While writing the factory which does desktop fennec builds I came across an issue with the l10n repacks failing with no explanation. I asked Aki for some help and he informed me of a .ini file that needed to be modified for the repacks to work. Once this was done repacks started working.
While still in testing, we noticed that all the repacks that work for real Maemo builds are working on desktop builds. Another issue with my patch was that I had missed some lines when duplicating my patch for our production environment (mozilla2-staging vs mozilla2) which caused Aki some hassle during the landing.
Once in production there was another issue with some of the repacks failing on one specific slave. The failure was while checking out the en_US source (mozilla-central). It turns out that there was a DNS issue with hg.mozilla.org during the night I was doing testing. Some slaves did do the repacks successfully which makes me think that we have DNS caching on our slaves and a couple of the slaves just happened to have hg.m.o in their cache. This would explain things nicely, and as they are now fully working.
#1 by Mark Finkle on June 18, 2009 - 4:40 pm
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Great job, John
#2 by willyaranda on June 18, 2009 - 4:49 pm
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I think you are having a Spanish text because that Folder is created the first time you use Fennec. If you created a profile with a es-ES build, you will get that name when using different l10n builds.
Try to create a new profile with a different language and you should get the correct string
Nice work!
#3 by Dan on June 18, 2009 - 4:57 pm
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My cursor disappears when it's over the Fennec window for me on Linux. Good job though, it means a lot of features can be tested without the need for a mobile device!
#4 by John H. Ford on June 18, 2009 - 5:15 pm
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thanks for the comments everyone
Willy, that makes lots of sense! Spanish was the first l10n build I tried out.
Dan, as I understand, that is desired behaviour on device as your finger is the cursor. For desktop builds, i am guessing that this is a nit that will be corrected as fennec matures.
#5 by Axel Hecht on July 30, 2009 - 5:40 am
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For intermingled text of other languages, l10n-merge can do that if you don’t prune the merge directory yourself. I’m not doing that automatically within compare-locales as removing directory trees is dangerous. The build automation should do that, though. And yeah, profile strings stick.
Regarding the cursor, jmaher just helped me on that. Go to about:config, and flip browser.ui.cursor to true, and restart. http://mxr.mozilla.org/mobile-browser/source/app/mobile.js#44 has the code.
I wonder if this is a pref that we should pick up from configure and disable for the desktop builds via the build.
#6 by Jeetendra Bhattad on September 10, 2009 - 1:03 am
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Hi John,
Great work. Could you please share the .mozconfig file that you used for building fennec for Win32.
Thanks.
#7 by John Ford on September 11, 2009 - 1:02 am
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Hi Jeetendra,
To build Fennec for desktop on Windows we use the Mozconfig in the mercurial repository at http://hg.mozilla.org/build/buildbot-configs under the directory mozilla2/win32/mobile-desktop/nightly/mozconfig
Here is a direct link to the current one: http://is.gd/38uPu
Remeber to check out http://hg.mozilla.org/mobile-browser to a mobile subdirectory of your main mozilla-central or mozilla-1.9.2 clone.