1414320 - Recognise well-understood platform names

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1470646

(Testing :: geckodriver, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Andreas Tolfsen ❲:ato❳]

When matching capabilities [1], the WebDriver specification encourages us to recognise “well-understood” platform names such as "windows", "mac", and "linux".  Currently, if Marionette/Firefox returns "windows_nt" we perform an equality match on this string.

According to the note in the specification it is fine for geckodriver to return a more specific platformName capability with that value, but we should be lenient in what platform names we accept as input.  As I understand it, this means we should accept "windows" as input if the current system is roughly Windows equivalent, and then return "windows_nt" (or whatever else the system gives us) as the negotiated platformName.

  [1] https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html#dfn-matching-capabilities

Comment 1

[Andreas Tolfsen ❲:ato❳]

With the above in mind, I think it is highly suspect to implement something from the specification that is in a note.  As I understand we are not bound to implement the more lenient platformName matching because it is not normative, but it would be “nice” of us to do so.

James, I trust you share my concerns about this particular note in the specification.  My opinion is that if something is to be implemented by a driver for sake of backwards compatibility it should be called out explicitly, and not in a note.  Do you have any recommendation how we can improve the spec situation for the future?

Comment 2

[James Graham [:jgraham]]

On master, not on the Rec branch, define what's meant by "more specific" and move it out of a note. For example is it any substring match? I think the reason it's in a note is that no one wants to detail what actually happens here, but we should probably just figure out what remote ends (as opposed to e.g. grid, which can do whatever it  likes) actually do.

Comment 4

[Venkatesh (:vpit3833)]

What is to be done for this bug?  I'd like to work on this.

Comment 5

[Andreas Tolfsen ❲:ato❳]

Oh sorry, it looks like I fixed this in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1470646 but forgot to
close this bug.