Maintaining Mozilla Windows Installer
Required files
Mozip
The only specific tool needed to create the localized installer is the mozip.exe tool. Mozip can extract files from the official english windows-installer and when the text files have been translated the tool can update the files in the installer and finally add the XPI file containing the Mozilla suite translation data.
The tool can be found at what looks like the mozip author's page.
Text editor
Any text editor will do, but I prefer to use notepad.
Danish (or any other localization) XPI data file
The danish XPI file can be found at http://www.gnuskole.dk/mozillabeta/
Fetch the XPI file matching the mozilla version you are creating an installer for.
Mozilla installer file
The most important file is the official windows installer, shipped from mozilla.org.
This file contains the 2 INI-files we are going to translate.
Extracting files
When the tools and data files have been fetched, place them all in the same directory.
I normally create a new directory for each release, so I can go back and look through translations, e.g. c:\mozilladk\mozilla-1.6. Place mozip.exe, mozilla-win32-1.x-installer.exe and the xpi file in this directory.
We then extract all the files in the compressed installer by running the mozip tool with the -x (extract) option as shown in the above image.
The mozip tool will the extract all the installer files into the current working directory.
Extracted files
There is two files of interest in the list of files extracted from the installer.
CONFIG.ini
This is the main configuration file for the installer and contains lots of strings that needs to be translated if the installer itself should be translated and useable for a non-english speaking user.
It is however possible just to change the filename of the language XPI to use.
To change the language XPI file, find the INI-section [Component En US lang pack] and change the string
Archive=langenus.xpi
to
Archive=langdadk16.xpi
INSTALL.ini
Contains general program strings for dialogs e.g. "Out of memory" error messages, "Next" and "Previous" button text strings.
This file does not change much from each release.
Adding changed files
When the two ini files has been translated and the XPI-filename in config.ini been changed, you will need to update the two ini files and add the xpi file to the installer.
The mozip has the following tool for updating and adding files to the given installer.
C:\mozilladk\mozilla-1.6> mozip <installer-exe> <filename to add/update>
E.g. if we want to update the danish translation xpi file in the installer, we run the following command:
C:\mozilladk\mozilla-1.6> mozip mozilla-win32-1.6-installer.exe