On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <[email protected]> wrote: > > On May 17, 2012, at 3:37 PM, Dirk Pranke <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:21 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:01 PM, Dirk Pranke <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> >>>> As I said before, I believe they increase the readability of the file. >>> >>> >>> I see them as pure noise. >>> >> >> Clearly, different people can have different syntactic preferences :). >> >>>> I believe the cost of learning to put delimiters in is near zero, >>> >>> >>> That clearly isn't near zero. Or else people wouldn't be complaining about >>> it. To quote Darin's response: >>> >>>> Seriously, syntax is a significant barrier. Having to know which special >>>> characters to use. I don’t see this “clear delineation” you speak of. Just >>>> special punctuation I have to use to satisfy the computer >> >> You don't have to re-quote this, I already did in this thread (and >> responded to it). >> >> With all due respect to Maciej and Darin, neither of them have spent >> any significant amount of time working with test_expectations.txt >> files. While I appreciate that it's nice for the syntax to be >> approachable for newbies, I'm not inclined to bias in favor of newbies >> over people who are experienced. Of the people who have actually used >> the file, so far you're the only person who's spoken up as not liking >> them. Since different people prefer different things, I'm inclined to >> go with the majority of experienced users here. I am sorry if that >> means you lose out; I don't like it if anyone is unhappy and would >> prefer it if we could please everyone. > > If you reject the input of people who are not yet users of > test_expectations.txt, you probably won't get new users of > text_expectations.txt. That would be bad for the project, so I hope that's > not your final answer. >
I hope it is clear that I am not rejecting the input of people who are not yet users. But, I also do not think that they should necessarily be given higher priority to people that have been using it heavily for a long time, given that all of us will quickly find ourselves in the latter camp. > More generally, I think understandability (whether for news or experts) > should take priority over familiarity. Sure, but I am inclined to bias for ease-of-use for experienced users over either of those two requirements. > Let's take an example. "TEXT" next to a test name apparently means that the > text fails. There is no way in the world I would guess that just from reading > an expectations file. This is only conceivably understandable to someone who > is an expert on the format. If someone used TEXT in code to mean "fail", I > would r- their patch for failure to use meaningful identifiers. > I hardly think you have to be an expert on the format. I think you probably need it explained to you once, or you could just read http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/TestExpectations (which is linked to from (I think) all of the expectations files). At the risk of overly repeating myself, I am not wedded to any one format here, but I'm also not inclined to change things just because a couple of people have vocally objected. If there was a clear consensus that any change was preferred, that's fine by me. -- Dirk _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
