[whatwg] WHATWG on Google+

[L. David Baron]

On Monday 2011-11-21 20:26 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Nov 2011, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> > 
> > What's needed is a way to notice when changes to a particular piece 
> > happen.  There isn't one.
> 
> Which pieces do you _not_ want to be notified of changes to?
> 
> I currently (try to) mark all changes that affect browser vendors as such 
> in the checkin comment (as opposed to, e.g., editorial changes or changes 
> that only affect authors and conformance checkers), but if there is some 
> other categorisation scheme for the checkins that would be more helpful, I 
> can definitely try a different mechanism.

I have tried to use these markings to filter changes; however, my
sense was that a majority of those marked as "g" didn't actually
require Gecko changes.  I think that's because you often mark things
as affecting browsers simply because the browsers implement that
section of the spec.  But it doesn't follow from that that the
browsers need to change, if the spec change is in an area where the
spec is being modeled on the browsers (i.e., further specification
of existing behavior required for Web compatibility) rather than the
browsers being modeled on the spec.  This seems more of a problem in
in areas where the browsers are closer to each other than the spec
is to them, since in those cases the spec changes are least likely
to require changes from the browsers.

When they do require Gecko changes, it's also often hard for me to
figure out if some Gecko developer needs to be notified or if that
developer is the person who requested the change in the first place.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂