RE: The Future of the Build System

+1

Thanks,
Zhiqiang

From: Geoffrey Sneddon [mailto:me@gsnedders.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 1, 2015 3:54 PM
To: Public CSS Test suite mailing list
Subject: 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.