PPAs and distributions upgrades

It’s not new but in case you didn’t know, when you use the Update Manager to change your distribution, PPAs are disabled by the dist upgrade script and must be re-enabled manually.

This just happened with Natty on Apr 28. It’s visible on the Chromium Daily PPA stats:

..that’s why the Google Chrome deb ships a cron job to re-add the repository if it’s gone. In the past, I discarded the idea as too intrusive, but maybe I should reconsider doing the same with the 4 Ubuntu Channels, as it doesn’t make sense security-wise to keep a browser unupgraded.

How many Chromium users in Ubuntu?

As the Chromium maintainer for Ubuntu, I often wonder how many users installed the different packages I maintain. It’s obviously difficult, not to say impossible, to tell how many of those are active users, mostly because it would imply adding some ping back mechanism that would hurt the privacy of some of those users, a line I am not willing to cross. So to try to answer this question, I depend on publicly available data.

To start with, I need to see where users are taking their chromium packages from.

Chromium 11 in Ubuntu

Chromium 11 has been released earlier today. It’s full of good stuff for your own pleasure. It also contains a list of security fixes longer than my arm, for your own protection.

Chromium translations explained: part 2b

In the second part of this series of posts about the Chromium translations, I mentioned a problem with a recent change in Launchpad that triggered the loss of hundreds of strings from contributors. I also mentioned a possible future evolution meant to improve the translation coverage of stable builds. After a long fight, it seems things are getting right again. Here is what changed, and why…

Chromium 9 in Ubuntu

Chromium 9.0.597.84 landed in Ubuntu a few hours ago. Compared to the previous stable release, it brings among other things the (opt-in) Instant search in the Omnibox (the URL bar), the Apps store and WebGL enabled by default.
It contains also a batch of security fixes. The codecs package has also been updated.

Chromium translations explained: part 2

In the first part of this series of posts about the Chromium translations, I covered Grit, the format of translations used by upstream for Chromium (and Google Chrome, ChromeOS..). In another post, I recently explained the release management of this project, showing that multiple branches evolve in parallel, inside the so called Channels. In this part, I will cover the interaction with Launchpad, and show how the strings are converted back and fourth, how the Launchpad contributed strings are merged with the upstream strings, and the various problems that came up since contributions started to flow.

Chromium release management explained

Some people seem to be confused about the Chromium release management, the weird x.y.z.t versions, the channels, the PPAs… I often receive questions about those subjects from end-users, but also from fellow Ubuntu developers. In this post, I will try to explain and demystify a few things. In order to do that, I also need to cover Google Chrome.

It may be a shock to you but the first thing you need to realize is that there is no such thing as an upstream release of Chromium. Give me some time to explain, it is not as bad as it sounds.

New Chromium security update and translations news

I’ve just submitted a security update of Chromium to Ubuntu Natty and to my fellow security sponsor Jamie for Maverick and Lucid.
It’s a minor update of Chromium version 8, namely 8.0.552.237~r70801.

The only tiny packaging change is that I landed 2 new languages that have a good enough coverage. So congratulations to the Basque and Galician translators, who started from scratch a few weeks ago and reached 100% of over 3200 strings in trunk, future version 10. That’s over 90% once backported to the (older) stable branch. You joined the 51 other languages already supported (inherited from Google Chrome), languages which also got their strings refreshed (same backport of the Launchpad strings).

Chromium translations explained: part 1

This is the first part of a series of posts about the Chromium translations. This part explains how the upstream translations work, next parts will cover the interaction with Launchpad, the machinery to convert strings back and forth, the merge of all strings per branch, and how it goes back to upstream and benefits the community.

Grit format

Chromium uses a format call Grit, standing for Google Resource and Internationalization Tool. As its name implies, it is a format created by Google, which is used in many internal projects, and some open-sourced projects like Chromium. It started on Windows, and has been extended to Mac and Linux.

More Chromium translations landed upstream

Good news! yesterday, a new batch of translations from the Ubuntu Translators (or should I say, from the Community) landed upstream in Chromium Trunk.
That’s all we had 2 days ago for the chromium_strings template (only this particular template, at least for now).

Even if it doesn’t make a visible difference if it’s upstreamed or not (it looks the same in the debs), it feels good to see more green and less purple in the dashboard I’ve presented earlier as it benefits not only Ubuntu, but also the other distros building Chromium, and even Chromium-OS. It also means this whole machinery is working ¹ so I’m glad I’ve spent time on this project.

As you see, there is still an awful lot of red so please, go help if you can.

Note that even new langs not in Google Chrome, like Basque (eu) and Galician (gl), have some of their strings upstreamed. So remember you all have your chance to see Chromium in your own lang.

¹ I’ve been asked to explain a bit about what’s behind all this, the conversion, the workflow, what’s so special about all this compared to other translations hosted in Launchpad. I’ll probably make a series of posts about this.