The Future of the Build System

Hi!

Yeah, it's me again. (I feel like I've single-handedly increased the
traffic on here sevenfold. Sorry!)

I believe that we have rough consensus (mostly from TPAC rather than
on-list discussions) that we should ensure that it's possible to run the
test suite without building anything except a manifest. To that end (mostly
also with rough consensus):

 * We should ensure the build system is capable of handling HTML as source
files and generating XHTML from them. (We're now at a point where every
known user of the CSS test suites support HTML, but not all support
XHTML—Servo is the notable exception here; furthermore, HTML content vastly
dominates and hence should be the preferred format.)

 * We should convert the source files to HTML. (We should probably move
away from HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.1 to HTML 5 which we're at it.)

 * We should introduce a lint tool given building now becomes optional, and
we need to introduce a manifest builder for the unbuilt test suite. We
should make sure the lint tool is a superset of the warnings from the build
system.

 * We should make the build system capable of grabbing authorship from
hg/git if it isn't explicitly defined.

/Geoffrey.