[webkit-help] Testing modifications to Webkit efficiently

[Konstantin Tokarev]

24.07.2016, 23:08, "Lay Kuan Loh" <lloh at andrew.cmu.edu>:
> Hi all,
>
> Newcomer to webkit here.

You're welcome :)

>
> I am trying to modify WebKit for my own purposes. I do not plan to ship my modifications to the official codebase.

If you accidentally make (whatever small) improvements which can be useful for other WebKit users, please consider upstreaming them. Every little piece counts.

>
> How would I check that the changes I make to WebKit did not break anything? For instance, I am making changes to the file WebKit/Source/WebCore/dom/Element.cpp and would like to test them incrementally.

You need to run Layout Tests. Read articles from https://trac.webkit.org/wiki#LayoutTests

You don't need to run all tests at once, run-webkit-tests allows you to specify directory or individual test files.

>
> From reading the documentation on using WebKit, it seems that I need to build the entire codebase by running build-webkit each time I want to test a new change I made. Given that it takes about 90 min to run the build on my laptop, this seems like an inefficient way of developing webkit.

Incremental rebuilds usually take much less time.

>
> I am trying to modify WebKit for my own purposes. I do not plan to ship my modifications to the official codebase.
>
> How would I check that the changes I make to WebKit did not break anything? For instance, I am making changes to the file WebKit/Source/WebCore/dom/Element.cpp and would like to test them incrementally.
>
> From reading the documentation on using WebKit, it seems that I need to build the entire codebase by running build-webkit each time I want to test a new change I made. Given that it takes about 90 min to run the build on my laptop, this seems like an inefficient way of developing webkit.
>
> Am I missing something obvious, on how to speed up testing my changes to WebKit? I've googled around but for some reason can't find any clear instructions on doing this.
>
> I've also posted the same question to stack overflow here.
>
> Thanks!
> ,
>
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-- 
Regards,
Konstantin