[webkit-dev] Pixel tests and displaying text

[Peter Kasting]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:

> On Dec 8, 2010, at 1:02 PM, Peter Kasting wrote:
>
> > the number of tests that fall into this bucket is hopefully small?
>
> Maybe we should talk about some specific tests. I can‘t think of many tests
> with no text that are self explanatory!


It's not so much whether the test is self-explanatory as whether, given a
result that differs from the baseline, it's obvious whether it's a failure
and how to proceed.

The particular change that triggered this thread, for example, was
http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/73531 .  The tests added in this commit are
basically of the standard "some number of green squares; red = failure"
form.  Moving the explanatory text from them into the HTML for the tests
themselves would not greatly decrease the ease with which someone could
understand why they'd suddenly started failing the tests.

Text is more useful when it's more likely that differences will occur that
are not obviously either OK or wrong.  In that case, having the text in the
test output saves a trip to the HTML source on the part of the person trying
to figure out whether he's seeing a failure.

PK
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