Fixing WebKit Development Annoyances

by Simon Fraser

• webkit-patch etc
  • Run from any directory
  • Support for webkit-patch upload —git-index
  • prepare-Changelog should work from any directory
• IRC Bots
  • > webkitbot: rollo0ut 235772: doesn’t build on non-cocoa platforms
  • < ‘webkitbot rollout’ failed with “Exception executing command: ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte…
• Bugzilla
  • Bulk-obsolete attachments (e.g. all the layout test failure archives)
  • Bulk marking of comments as obsolete
  • Show me a conflict one more time…
• Debugging
  • Every thing should be luggable
    • WebCore: TextSTream& operator<<(TextStream& ts, …)
    • JSC: void dump(PrintStream&) const
  • LOG_WITHSTREAM(Channel, stream << … );
  • Can’t WTFLogAlways() with a stream
  • More log channels!
    • (“I never know how to enable the log lines!”)
    • Need documentation on enabling login?
    • Make it easier to enable log channels and document them
• Debugging with lldb
  • We have formatters (with unit tests)
  • More lldb formatters please:
    • unique_ptr<>, Ref<>, RefPtr<>
    • HashMap<>/HashSet<>
  • Need a setup-my-machine-for-development, does setup that gives you all the debugging tools for development
• Debugging Tests
  • Can’t runtime-enable log channels in WTR/DRT
  • Can’t get stderr as it happens (only post-hot via --debug-rwt-logging)
  • Can’t easily attach to WTR or the WebProcess
  • (“I want a way to interactively write a layout test (Playgrounds for LayoutTests”)
• Test Expectations
  • Hard to maintain the 21 TestExpectations files
  • Hard to reason about the fallback path
• Test Results
  • Hard to create new baselines in the right directory
    • —new-baseline puts it in the most specific directory but that’s usually wrong
  • Easy to create redundant results (identical in > 1 directory)
    • Need a. Script to remove redundant results (diff and hoist them up)
• Commit Queue
  • Unattributed commits (at Apple)
  • 1630 unattributed commits in the past year (14%)
• Crowd Annoyances
  • “Get a bug in gmail, save webarchive, but too many scripts, just want a save the DOM and styles but skip scripts”
  • “ChangeLogs… why?”, “ChangeLog conflicts…”
  • “Unified build… want a non-unified build so I can find what changes”, “this is a growing problem, at least in WebCore”