[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 104858] "Running 1 DumpRenderTree over X shards" is not a helpful output

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104858





--- Comment #6 from Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com>  2012-12-13 01:13:57 PST ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> jargon is often, but not always, bad. Sometimes inventing new terms to accurately and concisely describe concepts is the right thing to do (I am not necessarily making that claim here, mind you).
> 
> All of Maciej's suggestions in comment #2 have the downside of being vague and interpreted as one of many possible concepts. In particular, NRWT already uses "part" and "chunk" to refer to different subsets of the test as well. "shard" has the virtue of having fairly specific connotations, even if they are being applied slightly differently here than one might be used to seeing them.
> 
> As I mentioned over #irc, in the server clustering / cloud community, a shard is *not* necessarily a separate physical resource; shards are virtual concepts that get mapped onto physical resources, typically in an M:N manner (which may of course be 1:1, but the whole point of a shard as opposed to a parallel database is that you can move shards between physical resources to redistribute the load, which is exactly what we're doing here).

I agree that sometimes jargon can be good for its precision, but you have to consider the possibility that a particular term may confuse more than it enlightens.

At least four WebKit contributors said on IRC that they actually found this confusing and misinterpreted the message. 

In light of this, it seems like a poor defense to say that it's technically correct jargon in the server clustering / cloud community. Probably most WebKit contributors are not part of the server clustering / cloud community, nor is there any reason to even assume server clustering is the context here..


(Also, it's kind of crazy that NRWT has so many distinct ways to group the tests that it's hard to find a free term! I am curious what "part" and "chunk" refer to and why they different from "shard".)

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