Re: Use of Ahem

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 9:34 AM James Graham <james@hoppipolla.co.uk> wrote:

> On 15/09/17 14:24, Geoffrey Sneddon wrote:
> > There's been a bunch of people recently commenting on having to
> > install Ahem to run some of the WPT tests locally; this has always
> > been somewhat contentious but as far as I can recall this was done
> > because of the long-tail of tests imported from elsewhere that relied
> > on Ahem being available.
>
> I haven't seen these comments, but we just fixed things so that
> wptrunner (and hence, |wpt run|, the wpt dashboard, etc.) can install
> Ahem automatically. I don't know if that has caused these comments, or
> postdates them, or what.
>
> In any case I feel like requiring people to include it as a webfont is
> unnecessary overhead compared to the status quo, so I would prefer not
> to change for that reason.
>

Yeah, seems like the status quo is OK, and updating that many tests looks
scary, how do be confident that nothing is breaking or becoming flaky?

I think there's an upside to having it as a system from as well, namely
that the loading behavior is different from web fonts. If one ever wanted
to test for the difference in loading behavior, then being able to have
Ahem both as a system font as a web font might just come in handy.