[webkit-dev] Please be careful with webkitpy changes!

[Brent Fulgham]

Hi Everyone,

We lost Windows EWS coverage for the past 36 hours due to a very benign-appearing change to some webkitpy code. I haven’t yet figured out why this particular set of changes caused the Windows bots to start failing, but it has to do with various differences between the Cygwin Python 2.7.8 build and the versions used on our other EWS bots.

This does not seem like something developers SHOULD have to worry about, but it’s an unfortunately reality that they really do need to.

To make matters worse, the patch that introduced the problem passed EWS. This is because the EWS bots only really begin using changes to webkitpy when they restart processing (about once every 10-13 build iterations).

To help combat this problem, I’d like to request that when making changes to webkitpy, please keep an eye on the various EWS bots to make sure they continue processing. If they do start failing, please roll the patch back out and we can work together to resolve the issue.

I apologize for how manual and inconvenient this needs to be (at least for now), but keeping the EWS up and running is critical to the smooth function of this project.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me or look for me on IRC.

Thanks!

-Brent