[webkit-dev] Platform LayoutTests are out of control

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:33 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulgham at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My initial knee-jerk reaction was to blame this on the multitude of
> Chromium layout archives (16 at last count).  Clearly this is needless bloat
> -- after all, what could possibly be the difference between
> "chromium-linux-x86_64" and "google-chrome-linux64".  Why are these even
> distinct entities? ;-)
>

I don't know the difference between those two but one of the reasons
chromium has many platforms is that we run pixel tests on our bots.  Because
pixel results may be different depending on how numbers are rounded, 32-bit
and 64-bit will have slightly different results.

It's worth nothing that Chromium port's bots caught quite few rendering
regressions because certain things such as caret (a.k.a. insertion point)
isn't recorded anywhere in render tree dumps and certain regressions such as
actual painting can only be tested by pixel tests.

But given that all other ports don't run pixel tests on bots, I'm not
certain how useful they are.  Of course, some people are running them
manually on their machines but it's a debatable whether it's worth the
latency for everyone to always have png/checksum files.

Is there any way we can tame this explosive growth?  Could platform results
> be located in a separate archive, so that they don't have to be constantly
> synced across all platforms?
>

I'm not sure about the actual size but svn-up time might improve if we get
rid of checksum files and embed them in png files as Tony proposed earlier
this month.

Also, there are many old tests that can be converted to dump-as-text and
dump-as-markup tests and converting them will certainly eliminate needs for
png/checksum files.

- Ryosuke
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