[webkit-dev] Deployment of new EWS Non-Unified builder

[Darin Adler]

Yes, I don’t oppose adding another EWS bot, and I was not trying to argue against that proposal. I did intend to express my disagreement with many points made in follow-up replies that seem quite wrong to me.

Three other thoughts:

1) Even though I don’t object to adding a new bot, I will say that the idea that a single “non-unified” bot will add a lot of value at very little cost to the WebKit project doesn’t sound right to me. These arguments about how long things will take don’t seem correct. My experience is that it’s quite difficult to find, understand, and resolve errors seen in bot builds, far more difficult than resolving errors I can see locally as I make code changes. In my view every EWS bot we add helps weigh down the project, making each change more difficult.

2) In my contributions, I don’t just want to add missing includes, I want to remove unnecessary ones taking full advantage of forward declarations and moving code out of headers. Too many includes and too much dependency has a dramatic bad effect on the project, making colossal project build times even worse.

3) We had many, many problems with platform-specific include differences before we had unified builds, with frustrated contributors if they worked with any configuration that lacked an EWS bot. It may seem that the unified-build-specific problems are something fundamentally different, but this is not how I see it.

— Darin