Meeting 2014 12 08

Servo Meeting 2014-12-08

Review reminder (jack) https://github.com/servo/servo/pulls has > 50 open. How to assign & start landing them?
Status of Rust upgrade to 4334d3c19699c65ba8cb354f84fa40e4b678bfa6? (jack)
Rust in Gecko update (jack)
HTTP cache review (jdm)
SpiderMonkey upgrade tasks (jdm)

B2S status: planning to land mwu's Gonk port, then clean up to be more like Android (larsberg)
Make Servo's build process directory-isolated - i.e., Cargo+snapshots in-tree? (larsberg)

jack: There are lots of pull requests open, thanks in part to jdm and larsberg's efforts at Mozlandia to get new contributors. Please help review them as quickly as we can. If everyone grabs a few it should be manageable. I'll be doing them in my free time.

jack: Does anyone besides Ms2ger know the status?
jdm: Last I heard it was blocked on "link errors."
jack: Did he push a branch to the servo repo? It's https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/rustup_20141124 it looks like. I can try to build that and check out the errors. If anyone is working on Android, they should build the branch and try to fix any errors.
gw: I can do that once I'm done with issues on master.

jack: We had a meeting (see notes) about how to get a component of Gecko written in Rust into the build infrastructure. We didn't talk yet about what component to land initially. We've talked before about image decoders, the URL parser, or other things. I talked a bit to seth, the image decoder owner for Gecko, and he had some suggestions. In particular, the BMP parser could be a good candidate. He also suggested some possible new projects (things that don't exist in Gecko today but are wanted). One was code to return some early information from the head of a network request, like the width and height of an image file, before the entire request is received. The other project is to do something with JPEG thumbnail data in JPEG files. This hurts things like the photo app in Firefox OS since it has to decode and scale down the full-size image instead of using the precomputed thumbnail.
zwarich: Can't you also subsample JPEG while decoding it?
jack: That may be something to investigate too. He did mention a potential security issue with JPEGs where people could maliciously make the thumbnail differ from the image, so maybe we just do that for images that Firefox OS creates. Anyway, Seth kind of volunteered to help define requirements for those projects.

jdm: I wrote a very simple memory cache a little while ago. Manish has offered to review it but hasn't gotten around to it. Would anyone like to volunteer to review it and learn a bit about HTTP caching?
pcwalton: I remember talking to Necko people about HTTP caching a long time ago, and their opinion was that we should do something as simple as possible. Gecko's HTTP cache is too smart for its own good, which ends up causing a lot of problems. That's all I know in a nutshell. Necko people might have more concrete feedback for us. Anyway, I'd be happy to look at it, though I'm not an expert.

jdm: I finally sat down and identified all the tasks needed for the SM upgrade to land. I sent a TODO list to dev-servo, split between things that can be done before the upgrade lands, and things that need to be done on the upgrade branch itself. mukilan volunteered for one issue already, and I welcome anyone else who can help. Basically we have a broken collections story; we need to create some new types to cover our uses of SpiderMonkey types in structures; and we need some lints to ban some things that are no longer acceptable.
jack: Can kmc take on the lints?
kmc: Sure, or maybe Manishearth. Is there an open PR for the upgrade?
jdm: No, we need to solve these issues first.
kmc: Okay, then I'll look at the email to see what's needed.
jack: I remember jorrendorf talking about the NSPR pthreads stuff, but I think he was confused about Rust's threading model during the first part of the meeting.
jdm: That's possible.
jack: Any more volunteers?
zwarich: I can do some.
jack: I'll try to recruit more support, and look at some of the easy ones myself.

pcwalton: The new Moz2D landed, so if anyone wants to implement stuff like text-shadow or elliptical border-radius, it should now be possible.
jack: File some bugs, especially any E-easy ones (or even E-less-easy).

pcwalton: By the way, if anyone can look at the issue with iframes disappearing (not painting), that's getting really annoying.
jdm: There's an open PR from mrobinson related to iframes.
jack: If it's not covered by open bugs, please file it.
zwarich: There are some open bugs related to this; we formed a plan at the October work week but have been busy with other stuff.
pcwalton: This is one of the biggest dogfooding blockers. The other one is parallel network resource loading.
jdm: I'll write up a plan for that once the refconted DOM changes are reviewed (#4057).