[webkit-dev] run-bindings-tests

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Sep 8, 2011, at 12:25 PM, Darin Adler wrote:

> On Sep 8, 2011, at 11:49 AM, Alexey Proskuryakov wrote:
> 
>> As discussed on IRC, I do not think that bots should run this test at all. It has a non-trivial maintenance cost, but provides very little benefit. Even the time spent by multiple engineers on IRC today discussing bot complaints is likely more than the test could save in the lifetime of the project, at my guesstimate.
> 
> I find the bindings tests quite helpful. Because the perl script is so hard to read, it’s the changes in bindings script test results that I look at when reviewing changes to the bindings scripts. The fact that the results are checked in helps me review patches.
> 
> It would be better to plug them in to the testing machinery in a better way. I don’t think contributors should have to learn how to run different types of commands.

Notwithstanding all the later discussion, I think run-bindings-tests would still be more effective as a build step that updates a source file rather than a test step. Recompiling after changing the bindings generator would then regenerate this file, and the diffs would be present in uploaded patches (as well as being obtainable to developers working locally by using svn diff or git diff respectively). That way, it's much harder to "do it wrong" and cause bot redness downstream. It's possible that this way you could cause bindings changes unintentionally, but presumably you and your reviewer will spot these when looking at the patch. It seems to me we shouldn't require an extra manual step to say "I really meant to change the text of the generated bindings".

Regards,
Maciej

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/attachments/20110912/fe22bb7d/attachment.html>