[webkit-dev] On frequently hosing other port's WebKit2 builds

[Andras Becsi]

Dear WebKit Community,

In the past few weeks there were several occasions where Apple-WebKit2 
developers ignored the red Qt EWS on Bugzilla and nonetheless committed 
their patches and let the Qt bot stay red for several hours without any 
sign of trying to fix the issues (mostly introduced by thoughtlessness), 
or asking for help on IRC, or even the webkit-qt mailing list, or CC'ing 
somebody to the bug who might be able to help fixing the problems before 
hosing the tree, like with these bugs:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47281
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47239
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47097
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46585
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46432
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46054
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46043

This is making the lives of the maintainers miserable because if a bot 
is already red it is completely ignored by other developers, which makes 
it really hard to catch up.
I respectfully think that this kind of arrogant and ignorant way of 
development does real harm to the community.
We have a really fast Qt EWS and the build failures weren't complex 
ones, the EWS would have only needed a minute more than the style-bot to 
have a nice output where the errors caused by left-in old API calls or 
old includes or left-out extra compiler definitions would have shown 
themselves, and I do not think waiting this few minutes would hurt 
anyone. Especially because this kind of behaviour is not only 
disrespectful to us, but also to Eric and Adam who are working hard to 
make these awsome QA technologies possible.

Comments like this https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47097#c10 are 
really frustrating, because all contributors are supposed to bother with 
the Mac xcodeproj files and their cryptic hashes, too (not to talk about 
the other nearly dozen build systems) if they implement something, and 
stringently have their patches checked on all the EWS.

Surpassing all my private disappointment, I think IRC, Bugzilla, the 
EWS's and other buildbots aren't there to force some kind of an unwanted 
ritual on developers, in which they only upload patches to Bugzilla to 
conform some policy, but to make collaboration possible.

I do not want my letter to be looked at as an offense or attack, I'd 
rather like to kindly ask the responsile ones to stop the ignorant and 
discriminative way of handling other ports, and at least try to show 
some respect on other developers work.

Sorry, if this souded like an offense.

WBR,
Andras Becsi

On behalf of the QtWebKit Team at the University of Szeged