[webkit-dev] About fixing "old" layout bugs

[Xianzhu Wang]

Hi, developers,

I'd really like my patches to be reviewed and landed. Could any
reviewer/commiter help me? The normal review/commit queue mechanisms aren't
suitable for the the patches because the layout-tests in them are almost
always out-dated.

Thanks,
Xianzhu

2010/8/1 Xianzhu Wang <phnixwxz at gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> Now the status of the three old bugs are:
> * white space preceding <br> (
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37261): New patches uploaded
> * relative font-size (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18413): New
> patches uploaded
> * line breaking around some punctuations (
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37698): Fixed
>
> For the <br> bug, I still split the patch into following parts to ease
> review:
> 1. A patch containing only the changed code and the added test;
> 2. A patch containing all affected text-only layout tests that differ only
> about trailing spaces;
> 3. A patch containing all affected DRT layout tests that differ only about
> trailing spaces of text rendering nodes;
> 4. A patch containing other layout tests that have been manually adjusted;
> 5. A patch containing changed Skipped files of other platforms.
>
> The above 2 and 3 were auto generated by scripts. And instead of
> rebaslining tests of other platforms, I simply (temporarily) added the
> affected tests into Skipped files. I used the similar method to generate the
> patch for the second bug but didn't split it because the patch is much
> smaller. The patches also don't contain pixel tests to reduce the scope and
> size.
>
> Because of rapid changes of affected layout tests, the patches had already
> been out-dated even before I uploaded them. It seems to me that the normal
> process of review queue and commit queue doesn't work for such patches.
> Would any committer please help review and maybe commit the patches?
>
> Thanks,
> Xianzhu
>
> 2010/6/2 Xianzhu Wang <phnixwxz at gmail.com>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm new to webkit development, and I'd like to hear opinions about the
>> problems I met.
>>
>> Now I'm trying to fix some "old" layout bugs, for example:
>>    * white space preceding <br> (
>> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37261)
>>   * relative font-size (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18413)
>>   * line breaking around some punctuations (
>> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37698)
>>
>> Some people have warned me about the difficulty of fixing these bugs, and
>> now I have realized it. Fixing the bugs themselves is not very difficult,
>> for example, only 2 functional lines change can fix the first bug. However,
>> the change will break more than 4000 existing layout tests mostly because
>> trailing spaces preceding <br>s in current expectations of the tests (for
>> example, "PASS " vs "PASS"). I tried to rebaseline all effected layout tests
>> (for now on mac only), and the patch is about 6MB (Sorry I overlooked the
>> "Bigfile" option when I submitted the patch, so I split it into 4 parts).
>>
>> My questions are:
>>
>> 1. The bugs violate the standards and cause some site compatibility
>> issues. However, because the bugs are old, some web developers might treat
>> them as features and depend on them, so fixing them might break some
>> existing pages. Is there any existing policy about this problem? Are these
>> bugs worth fixing?
>>
>> 2. What's the best practice to deal with a patche containing many updated
>> layout test expectations? Is there a good way to rebaseline the effected
>> tests on all platforms?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Xianzhu
>>
>>
>
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