Layout tests are really big and get in the way of tracking SVN for casual developers.
Putting tests into another modules, maybe seperate modules for webpages & bugzilla too, would be nice for people who wants to test latest svn.
The tests are large, which is the main issue. The website and bugzilla html sources (project infrastructure) although not as large, have a lot of small files that slow down SVN stat/diff, so we should look into getting those out of the way too at the same time. I have a feeling moving the sources into a subdirectory will make more sense than moving everything else out of the way, but I didn't investigate this fully yet.
My 2¢: 1. It's possible to check out part of an SVN tree. You can pull down WebCore and JavaScriptCore and WebKit and WebKitTools individually w/o getting any of the rest of the stuff. 2. It's impossible to do any sort of web engine hacking w/o lots of really good tests. I think the LayoutTests layout could be improved, possibly not to pull down all the results for all the platforms. Perhaps someone could come up with a nice script in WebKitTools to do a partial checkout. But I think that LayoutTests should remain part of the default checkout.
(In reply to comment #3) > My 2¢: > > 1. It's possible to check out part of an SVN tree. You can pull down WebCore > and JavaScriptCore and WebKit and WebKitTools individually w/o getting any of > the rest of the stuff. SVN doesn't deal with this situation. If you try using a partial checkout you'll see how svn up etc. break down rapidly because of the pathological layout. There are two approaches for developers to track SVN without doing a full checkout: 1) A shell script that has built in replacements for svn up, svn diff etc. specifically for the WebKit project (ie. it checks out GNUmakefile.am, configure.ac etc. individually and hashes and updates them from SVN). This didn't work well when new sources were added at the root and was becoming a support headache. 2) Debian's filtered git repository [1]. This is also flaky and doesn't solve the problem fully and can't be used to dcommit. It also means we have to teach people how to use git who would otherwise never need it. [1] http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-webkit/upstream.git;a=shortlog;h=filtered > 2. It's impossible to do any sort of web engine hacking w/o lots of really > good tests. Not really relevant here. This bug is about making things easier for WebKit porters and users. People who use the tests will be able to check them out and use them the same as ever after improving SVN layout. We depend on community contributions for things like documentation, testing on different architectures and platforms we don't have access to and clearly from the feedback, they're just giving up or using stale tarballs right now. This is becoming a major issue for projects experimenting with WebKit.
Closing this old bug.