Removing strings

Marking an unused string to be removed

Removing strings manually could cause crashes in Beta and Release versions 💥 , as the removed strings could be uplifted to release branches by mistake, where strings are still needed. For this reason, we need a special process to remove them.

Any landed string that is not removed while in development in Nightly will persist through 3 Firefox releases (Nightly, Beta, Release) before we can remove them from our code base. For example, if you want to remove a string that has already shipped prior to Firefox Nightly 93, the same string will still be in-use in Firefox Beta 92 and Firefox Release 91. This means the string will be marked as unused and removed in 93 while still riding the train, and it can be removed safely when Firefox Release 93 no longer ships, for instance, Firefox Release 94 and beyond.

To keep us safe when you want to remove strings from nightly:

1. Add these attribute to the target strings moz:removedIn="<<ACTUAL_NIGHTLY_VERSION>>" and tools:ignore="UnusedResources".

    <string name="onboarding_close" moz:removedIn="93" tools:ignore="UnusedResources">Close</string>

Example commit https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/pull/6291/files

When to remove an unused string and how

Strings that have been tagged with moz:removedIn attributes are safe to be removed after the marked version is no longer shipping and no longer in-use or needed.

Consult the Firefox release calendar. Let’s say the Beta cut just happened and we are at Firefox Nightly 109, Firefox Beta 108 and Firefox Release 107. Everything marked with moz:removedIn <= 106 can now be removed.

You only need to remove the en-US strings within values/strings.xml, and this change will propagate to the other locales.

Future

It would be nice to add some automatization to delete the strings that have the moz:removedIn attributes where a full cycle has happen (3 releases versions from the actual release version).