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

[Xianzhu Wang]

Hi,

I'm still wondering what the best practice is to deal with many updated
layout tests in a patch. It seems I must run the layout tests on all
effected platforms by myself to ensure a green build after committing the
patch, right? This is really difficult to me. Is there a easier way?

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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