[webkit-dev] Cleaning up directories in WebCore

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
> > Still, if I see a crash in shipped version of Chrome, then I have to
> > remember to map between different paths, which will be a huge cognitive
> > overhead for the next couple of months if we start the move now. Also,
> there
> > are zillion WebKit crash bugs with stack trace. Those file paths need to
> be
> > moved as well. In addition, all work-in-progress patches and local git
> > branches will likely to conflict with these moves.
>
> We move files around all the time.  If we're afraid to move files for
> these reasons, we'll be stuck with bad organizational choices we made
> in the distant past.  WebKit's philosophy is to think of the future as
> large, so the future benefits of these sorts of changes often outweigh
> the transition costs.
>

Sure. But the question is whether doing this re-org will benefit us in the
end or not. I don't think we can always assume any re-org is good.

 >> One of the benefits of this approach is to encourage the folks writing
> >> these blocks of code to make them more self-contained so that the core
> >> part of the engine has fewer ifdefs.
> >
> > I agree this is a good goal. I'm yet convinced that the proposal
> directory
> > reorg would accomplish this though. Perhaps a better way to accomplish
> this
> > is to introduce some sort of header inclusion rules.
>
> I've done some analysis of header inclusion dependencies, and they're
> actually pretty good for these directories.  The main issues at the
> moment are "hub" classes like Page, Frame, and Document, which need to
> be touched by many features.


One thing I wanted to do is separate those "hub" part of Page, Frame, and
Document into PageBase, FrameBase, and DocumentBase. (Or use Hub that the
word has been coined). This has a nice side-effect of reducing the header
file dependency and possibly reducing the compilation time.

One of the things I'm planning to do is remove more ifdefs from these
> files, which, as a side effect, will improve the dependencies.
>

Yes, that'll be great.

- Ryosuke
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