[webkit-dev] style-queue entering beta

[David Levin]

fwiw, I'm not aware of any bad error reports that people are hitting in
practice although as Adam mentioned it is possible for various reasons. If
we hit any incorrect warnings with any frequency, we should disable them or
fix them.

Of course, there are a lots of WebKit style guidelines that it doesn't
catch.


> One basic reason the script isn't perfect is that it's doesn't have a
> full C++ / Objective-C++ parser.

If we could go this route, would we prefer it?

It may be a really good thing. It would depend on how complicated the
tool/code got. As far as this tool goes, it is derived from an open source
version of what Google uses in house and then originally adapted for WebKit
by Shinichiro Hamaji. It primarily relies on regex. In the past I wrote a
closed source tool that used a parser to do style fixes in lots of ways, and
I appreciated the exactness of the results.

One nice thing about the current code is that it is pretty accessible to new
folks. I don't think that was as true of the tool I wrote on top of the
parser which examined and manipulated syntax trees.

Dave

PS In fact, some checks by various folks in WebKit were made to catch less
things in order to avoid false negatives because noisy incorrect tools are
just annoying (and imo frequently are justifiably ignored).

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 5:55 PM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:

> Yeah, I think improving the script would be great.  I'm not actually
> an expert on how it works internally, but I think David Levin is.
> It's easy for the bot to pass a flag to the script if that would be
> helpful.  In general, I think we should give it a try and iterate to
> remove the biggest pain points.
>
> Thanks!
> Adam
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Chris Jerdonek
> <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 9:35 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
> >
> >> On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Chris Jerdonek
> >> <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009,  Adam Barth wrote:
> >>>> Hopefully, the script will improve over time, but it will
> >>>> never be perfect.
> >>>
> >>> Can you elaborate on this?  For example, are you saying there is a
> >>> basic reason that the script will always have bugs?  Without knowing
> >>> too much about the script, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to at
> >>> least make the false negatives go away.  Or are you simply saying that
> >>> the guidelines and script will never fully capture what we mean by
> >>> "correct style"?
> >>
> >> Does this mean you're volunteering to remove all the false positives
> >> and false negatives?  :)
> >
> > I was hoping to work on the script eventually, which is partly why I
> > asked for elaboration.
> >
> > All that I meant above is that one could potentially disable (for the
> > bot) the style tests that report false violations, or else reduce
> > their confidence score.  That way, if the style bot flags a patch, it
> > is guaranteed to be meaningful without looking at the details of the
> > report.  This can only be done, though, if the problems with the
> > script are not so basic that they affect most or many of the tests.
> >
> > (The reverse is not as straightforward, though.  It does not seem as
> > easy to change the script -- in a useful way -- so that if it reports
> > that a patch has met the guidelines, then the patch really meets the
> > guidelines.)
> >
> >> One basic reason the script isn't perfect is that it's doesn't have a
> >> full C++ / Objective-C++ parser.
> >
> > If we could go this route, would we prefer it?
> >
> > --Chris
> >
>
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