EPIC Goal

Lead the community effort to move the Backstage internationalization framework from "experimental" to "stable" to de-risk its adoption in RHDH and provide a stable foundation for multi-language support.

Background/Feature Origin

RHDH has a requirement to support multiple languages for our global user base.
The upstream Backstage project provides an internationalization (i18n) framework, but it is currently marked as "experimental." Before we can build upon this framework, we must first lead the effort to stabilize it, ensuring it is robust, supported, and ready for enterprise use.
This epic covers the investigation, community collaboration, and contribution necessary to achieve that stability.

Why is this important?

This is a strategic investment.

By driving the stabilization effort, we mitigate the risk of building on an unstable API, reduce future maintenance costs, and prevent rework caused by breaking changes.

It also positions Red Hat as a key contributor to the Backstage community, ensuring the platform's core capabilities align with our enterprise needs.

User Scenarios

• As an RHDH Engineer, I want a stable and officially supported internationalization framework so that I can confidently build and maintain multi-language features for our customers without risk.
• As a Backstage community member, I want the internationalization framework to be stable and well-documented so that I can easily adopt it in my organization's Backstage instance.

Dependencies (internal and external)

• External: Heavy dependency on active collaboration and alignment with the upstream Backstage maintainers and community.
• Internal: This epic is important for any product-level localization work. It will require close collaboration between the @rhdh-frontend, @rhdh-plugin, and @rhdh-docs teams.

Acceptance Criteria

• A formal investigation into why the i18n framework is "experimental" status is completed and the findings are shared publicly with the Backstage community and RHDH team.
• A public roadmap for stabilization, outlining all required tasks, is created and agreed upon with upstream maintainers.
• All high-priority pull requests defined in the roadmap are merged into the upstream Backstage repository.
• The official Backstage documentation is updated to reflect the framework's stable status and provide clear guidelines for its use.
• The `experimental` designation is officially removed from the internationalization framework in a subsequent Backstage release.