[webkit-dev] webkit-dev Digest, Vol 208, Issue 5

Thu Sep 29 11:48:47 PDT 2022

>> On Sep 20, 2022, at 1:52 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulgham at apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sep 20, 2022, at 1:16 AM, Ryosuke Niwa via webkit-dev <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 19, 2022, at 2:28 PM, Brandon Stewart via webkit-dev <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org <mailto:webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Documentation is an important part of any open source project, especially for a larger project like WebKit. Being able to ramp up during the onboarding process, reading up on architectural decisions, and learning how to perform common procedures are all features the documentation should tackle. WebKit has a large set of documentation already, but it is scattered around a wide range of platforms (Trac, GitHub Wiki, markdown files in the code, Git commits, etc...), and some of the information is out of date.
>>> 
>>> This ultimately feels like this situation:
>>> https://xkcd.com/927/ <https://xkcd.com/927/>
>>> 
>>> I?ve been working on https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Introduction.md <https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Introduction.md> for the past couple of years, and I?d would have preferred to have a collaboration rather than a competition here.

Right now we have:
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/wiki
https://trac.webkit.org/
https://webkit.org/getting-started/
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Introduction.md

Brandon’s solution is designed to replace the first 2, and he has buy in from the maintainers of the first two, when his solution is deployed, our existing wikis will die.

I think https://webkit.org/getting-started/ and https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Introduction.md are both designed to be too narrow to be a dumping ground for all our documentation. 

>> 
>> Ryosuke: Your document is outstanding, and is a large part of the content we pulled into the current repo. I don?t think we view this as a competition; rather we are trying to host a collection of Markdown content in a common repo that does not have to be pulled and synced with WebKit source and tests. This provides a lower bar for people interested in contributing documentation as they do not have to download and sync Gigabytes of WebKit code to write documentation.
> 
> Who are these people who want to contribute to WebKit?s documentation yet doesn?t already have a clone of WebKit repository? I just can?t think of people who would fit that description.

Mixing together documentation commits with commits which change product code is not great, it makes tracking down regressions more difficult for the same reasons we like monotonically increasing commit numbers. I think this is a trade off well worth it for Introduction.md, but not for something like https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/wiki/Source-Control#identifiers.

It’s also worth calling out that Jon Davis and I have had a similar discussion about https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/main/Websites/webkit.org, that’s probably something we shouldn’t be committing to the same repository with all our product code.

> 
> (2) is particularly important because many people who are new to WebKit often don?t know what they don?t know. This is why, for example, memory management section appears towards the beginning of the document and the information about adding IDL files is immediately followed by the discussion of JS wrapper lifecycles. With these information now split across multiple files, it?s easy for people to miss out on critical information. In the ideal world, people won?t be adding or editing IDL files before they understood how JS wrappers are managed because not knowing the latter is a sure way of introducing subtle GC bugs.
> 
>>>> A few months ago, I started working on a new documentation solution based on the DocC documentation framework.
>>> 
>>> Was there any discussion as to which documentation framework should be used? I?m personally not familiar with DooC documentation, and I?m  surprised that such an important decision was made unilaterally without much discussion on webkit-dev.
>> 
>> We discussed this internally, but today?s message is the first discussion on this repository that we?ve opened on the webkit-dev mailing list. We wanted to convince ourselves that the tool worked well, and was easy to use, and could produce documentation output that would be useful for Apple engineers. That is not the only intended audience for this work, but is the origin of this effort which we wanted to make available to others to use and contribute to.
>> 
>> Those of us who have worked on WebKit for some time can easily remember the many discussions over the years about documentation efforts of various types. Lots of people have strong opinions, but few ever contribute despite their opinions of the right way for the work to be done. You are obviously part of the group that has contributed heavily, so I am sad that you do not seem to like our approach.
> 
> Right, it?s why I wrote Introduction.md in the first place.

We have many things which need to be documented that should not be in Introduction.md, though. An example I know I’ve dealt with recently is the management of EWS bots. This isn’t something that belong at the top-level of the WebKit repository, but it’s clearly important. Our historic answer to this has been Trac’s Wiki, but that solution isn’t compatible with GitHub, we clearly need something new.

> 
>>>> I have tested this on macOS and Linux and have found it works extremely well. (Windows should be able to use WSL2 at the moment, while a few remaining issues get sorted out). The only dependency for this project is a recent installation of Swift.
>>> 
>>> Previously, we?ve rejected Swift as a general purpose programming languages in WebKit: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2014-July/026722.html <https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2014-July/026722.html> other than to allow existing C++ code to call into Swift API: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-June/031882.html <https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2021-June/031882.html>
>>> 
>>> As such, I don?t think we should require having a functional Swift toolchain as a requirement for contributing to WebKit or its documentations either.
>> 
>> DocC is not a requirement to use or participate in this work. It?s simply a ?port? of the documentation that works for our needs. If others prefer to ?build? output documentation from Markdown using a different tool set, they are welcome to contribute those build commands and instructions.
> 

Something else worth calling out here is that contributing DocC compatible markdown is similar to contributions to https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/main/Websites/webkit.org that eventually end up on webkit.org <http://webkit.org/>, except that we have a nice path to automating DocC deployment (either to GitHub pages or a webkit.org <http://webkit.org/> property). We pretty frequently use technologies in our services we don’t intend contributors to regularly run at desk.

> 
>> Our goal is to accumulate all relevant and open source documentation related to WebKit in this repository so that we can generate searchable documentation. We would also like this to be accessible and searchable from the web.
> 
> I suggest that we don?t migrate contents of https://trac.webkit.org/wiki <https://trac.webkit.org/wiki> to whatever new documentation we create.  Most information on that wiki is extremely outdated or outright wrong.

That very much depends on the section of Trac’s Wiki you’re looking at. https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/TestExpectations is ancient, but pretty accurate, for example. Same for https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/LayoutTestsSearchPath (despite the references to ancient MacOS versions). We need to do some serious clean up (which probably involves a lot of deletion), but blind deletion seems unwise.

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