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

Thu Sep 29 17:26:29 PDT 2022

> On Sep 29, 2022, at 4:28 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sep 29, 2022, at 11:48 AM, Jonathan Bedard via webkit-dev <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org <mailto:webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>>> On Sep 20, 2022, at 1:52 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulgham at apple.com <mailto:bfulgham at apple.com>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sep 20, 2022, at 1:16 AM, Ryosuke Niwa via webkit-dev <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org <mailto: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> <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range of platforms (Trac, GitHub Wiki, markdown files in the code, Git commits, etc...), and some of the information is out of date.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 don’t think there is a community wide buy-in to replace either documentations / tools at this point. I don’t think people who happen to maintain the infrastructure get to have unilateral say on which tools will get supported or deprecated.

This is an effort to get community wide buy-in.

But it’s also worth noting that services (Trac, in particular) aren’t free to maintain, while we don’t have anything forcing action on Trac yet, it is likely we will be forced to do something in the future. And folks maintaining infrastructure might be forced to unilaterally make decisions in the future if the community hasn’t already made a decision. My point in bringing up the deprecation of our other two Wiki sources is that I don’t think we’re in the “competing standards” situation referenced in the xkcd comic.

> 
>>>>>> 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.
> 
> That sounds strictly worse than contributing to Trac wiki or Github wiki, or even Introduction.md then. Why are we making contribution to documentation harder than it already is?

I wouldn’t describe it as “worse”, it’s different. It’s not obvious (to me, at least) that the sort of web-UI editing that GitHub’s Wiki and Trac’s Wiki provides is actually desirable. We have to restrict who can edit these sorts of wiki (in GitHub, in particular), so brand new contributors can’t even suggest wiki edits and additions. And in GitHub, at least, each revision can only contain edits to a single file unless you checkout the Wiki repo, which starts to sound a lot like the DocC workflow.

I think allowing contributors without commit access yet to contribute to documentation is a really useful feature of Brandon’s plan, and I think contributors getting a once-over from someone else before publishing documentation is also a good idea, I know it’s something I’ve often asked for informally on existing wikis.

> 
>>>> 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.
> 
> Where did I suggest blind delete? My suggestion is to very selectively migrate information.

You did suggest that “we don’t migrate contents of https://trac.webkit.org/wiki”. If we want to selectively migrate information from Trac, we still need a place to migrate that information to. Introduction.md is definitely not the right place for much of this, so that leaves the GitHub Wiki (which, I might point out, was never discussed as a community either, I started it so we could discuss migrating Trac in the future, but it’s never been officially “blessed") or Brandon’s DocC documentation repo as the two proposed choices

> 
> - R. Niwa

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