Re: Towards a better testsuite: Build System

> On Apr 14, 2016, at 9:47 PM, Geoffrey Sneddon <me@gsnedders.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 6:00 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
>> I don't have much opinion on whether we keep or discard the
>> build system, but I don't think in any case that it should
>> be necessary in order for people to run or otherwise use the
>> tests. Tests are identified by filename, and run just fine
>> without the build system, so there's no need to build in the
>> general case.
> 
> For those who don't read minutes: on the telecon I took ACTION-766 to
> essentially discard the build system.

The action wasn’t to “discard” the build system, it was to make building un-necessary to run the tests. As I said on the call, we have infrastructure (the harness, the spec annotation system, et al) that currently relies on the build output. I thought it was fairly clear that we’d still be running the existing build system on the server until the infrastructure gets updated to not rely on it.

> 
> https://bitbucket.org/gsnedders/w3ctestlib/commits/d53d2407c01fc9ce62b68c7256b709c77d4d2a04
> achieves this. It'd be great to get this reviewed and landed, Peter,
> along with everything else on my fork of w3ctestlib.

We can’t land this change, as it would totally break the test harness and annotation system.

A workable approach is to leave the existing build system in place (including the index pages), but have a switch that makes the build script simply build the manifest file(s) instead. I’m fine if the new behavior is the default as I can add the switch to the server’s build process quickly enough.

FWIW, people have used the implementation report templates so we should keep those as well.

Peter

Received on Sunday, 17 April 2016 23:29:23 UTC