(for upgrading users, please see the notes at the bottom)
Bazel brought a lot of nice things to the table, such as rebuilds based on
content changes instead of modification times, caching of build products,
detection of incorrect build rules via a sandbox, and so on. Rewriting the build
in Bazel was also an opportunity to improve on the Makefile-based build we had
prior, which was pretty poor: most dependencies were external or not pinned, and
the build graph was poorly defined and mostly serialized. It was not uncommon
for fresh checkouts to fail due to floating dependencies, or for things to break
when trying to switch to an older commit.
For day-to-day development, I think Bazel served us reasonably well - we could
generally switch between branches while being confident that builds would be
correct and reasonably fast, and not require full rebuilds (except on Windows,
where the lack of a sandbox and the TS rules would cause build breakages when TS
files were renamed/removed).
Bazel achieves that reliability by defining rules for each programming language
that define how source files should be turned into outputs. For the rules to
work with Bazel's sandboxing approach, they often have to reimplement or
partially bypass the standard tools that each programming language provides. The
Rust rules call Rust's compiler directly for example, instead of using Cargo,
and the Python rules extract each PyPi package into a separate folder that gets
added to sys.path.
These separate language rules allow proper declaration of inputs and outputs,
and offer some advantages such as caching of build products and fine-grained
dependency installation. But they also bring some downsides:
- The rules don't always support use-cases/platforms that the standard language
tools do, meaning they need to be patched to be used. I've had to contribute a
number of patches to the Rust, Python and JS rules to unblock various issues.
- The dependencies we use with each language sometimes make assumptions that do
not hold in Bazel, meaning they either need to be pinned or patched, or the
language rules need to be adjusted to accommodate them.
I was hopeful that after the initial setup work, things would be relatively
smooth-sailing. Unfortunately, that has not proved to be the case. Things
frequently broke when dependencies or the language rules were updated, and I
began to get frustrated at the amount of Anki development time I was instead
spending on build system upkeep. It's now about 2 years since switching to
Bazel, and I think it's time to cut losses, and switch to something else that's
a better fit.
The new build system is based on a small build tool called Ninja, and some
custom Rust code in build/. This means that to build Anki, Bazel is no longer
required, but Ninja and Rust need to be installed on your system. Python and
Node toolchains are automatically downloaded like in Bazel.
This new build system should result in faster builds in some cases:
- Because we're using cargo to build now, Rust builds are able to take advantage
of pipelining and incremental debug builds, which we didn't have with Bazel.
It's also easier to override the default linker on Linux/macOS, which can
further improve speeds.
- External Rust crates are now built with opt=1, which improves performance
of debug builds.
- Esbuild is now used to transpile TypeScript, instead of invoking the TypeScript
compiler. This results in faster builds, by deferring typechecking to test/check
time, and by allowing more work to happen in parallel.
As an example of the differences, when testing with the mold linker on Linux,
adding a new message to tags.proto (which triggers a recompile of the bulk of
the Rust and TypeScript code) results in a compile that goes from about 22s on
Bazel to about 7s in the new system. With the standard linker, it's about 9s.
Some other changes of note:
- Our Rust workspace now uses cargo-hakari to ensure all packages agree on
available features, preventing unnecessary rebuilds.
- pylib/anki is now a PEP420 implicit namespace, avoiding the need to merge
source files and generated files into a single folder for running. By telling
VSCode about the extra search path, code completion now works with generated
files without needing to symlink them into the source folder.
- qt/aqt can't use PEP420 as it's difficult to get rid of aqt/__init__.py.
Instead, the generated files are now placed in a separate _aqt package that's
added to the path.
- ts/lib is now exposed as @tslib, so the source code and generated code can be
provided under the same namespace without a merging step.
- MyPy and PyLint are now invoked once for the entire codebase.
- dprint will be used to format TypeScript/json files in the future instead of
the slower prettier (currently turned off to avoid causing conflicts). It can
automatically defer to prettier when formatting Svelte files.
- svelte-check is now used for typechecking our Svelte code, which revealed a
few typing issues that went undetected with the old system.
- The Jest unit tests now work on Windows as well.
If you're upgrading from Bazel, updated usage instructions are in docs/development.md and docs/build.md. A summary of the changes:
- please remove node_modules and .bazel
- install rustup (https://rustup.rs/)
- install rsync if not already installed (on windows, use pacman - see docs/windows.md)
- install Ninja (unzip from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/tag/v1.11.1 and
place on your path, or from your distro/homebrew if it's 1.10+)
- update .vscode/settings.json from .vscode.dist
* Prevent multiple inclusion of variables in CSS files
* Use dict instead of tuple for variables
* Add comments to variables
* Improve appearance of main window
* Tweak main window styles
* Use json.dumps over pprint.format
* Make study button primary
* Improve header margin
* Make bottom toolbar slimmer
* Make congrats page more balanced
* Fix type issue
* Replace day/night with light/dark
* Exclude top-level-drag-row from hover effect
* Create dataclass for variables
* Run formatter
* Apply CSS variables from Python side
Why go full-circle with the Sass variables? This way we only need one interface for add-on authors to interact with. It also makes it easier for us to apply additional themes in the future.
* Fix typing
* Fix rgba values in Qt
* Darken button background
* Fix palette not being applied in light theme
For some odd reason this problem arose much later than #2016.
* Tweak default button look
* Reformat
* Apply CSS vars to ts pages
* Include elevation in button_mixins_lib
* Cast opacity to int
* Add some margin to studiedToday info
* Tweak light theme button gradient
* Tweak highlight-bg for light theme
* Add back default button color
as it made the browser sidebar tool icons dark in light theme.
* Reformat
* Tweak light theme buttons once more
Sorry for the back-and-forth. Sass only compiles when there are changes in user files, not when I only change the vars.
* Fix bottom toolbar button indicators
* Make buttons more clicky
* Fix button padding
* Handle macOS separately again
* Decrease elevation effect for main window buttons to 1
* Imitate box-shadow for Qt elements
* Adjust shadow vars
* Adjust primary border color
because the save button in the deck options had a lighter color than its background gradient.
* Boost box-shadow color of primary buttons
* Format
* Adjust Qt box-shadow imitation and shadow colors
* Use more subtle default shadow color
* Add some more padding to top toolbar
* Revert "Apply CSS vars to ts pages"
This reverts commit 5d8e7f6b7ffc8894b6517ecbb8cfba35407fc69a.
* Revert "Apply CSS variables from Python side"
This reverts commit 87db774412fd2bfd75e2630d2c5e782daef96b5f.
* Better match the standard macOS buttons
In the dark theme the standard color is a lighter grey, but at least
the size/shape is similar again.
This doesn't work for the editor buttons.
* Reduce the top margin of the congrats screen
* Fix illegible buttons when changing theme on macOS; match dark button style
* Create _input-mixins.scss
* Use button-mixins on more elements
* Replace <select> tag with custom Select component
* Fix RevertButton causing cursor: pointer when hidden
* Increase SaveButton chevron width
* Hide floating component box-shadow when inactive
* Rework SpinBox and move it into components
* Run eslint and prettier
* Remove leftover options prop
* Pass disabled array to EnumSelector again
* Update MapperRow.svelte
* Darken QHeaderView border color
Slipping this in without an extra PR.
* Adjust disabled color, border and cursor
* Remove redundant icon definition from stylesheets
* Fix deck options initial config
* Fix z-index issues in change notetype screen
It might be best to handle z-index locally in each user component instead of hard-coded component values.
* Give web SpinBox a horizontal design
* Give QRadioButton the same treatment as QCheckBox in #2079
* Fix unused CSS selector warning with base button-mixin
* Remove redundant import
* Fix deck options save button
* Delete input-mixins and remove unused down-arrow
* Run eslint on change-notetype
* Run eslint on components
* Fix custom scrollbar not showing
* Move body selector out of scrollbar mixin
* Apply custom scrollbar to child elements too
* Remove some duplicate definitions
* Run prettier
* Format scss correctly so it passes ts:format
* Use on and singleCallback in ImageHandle and MathjaxHandle
* Add a few comments
* Fix relict of partial commit
* Fix 'element not found' in ImageHandle
* Remove setting css on image handle twice
* Remove use of container in ImageHandle
* Remove use of container in MathjaxHandle
* Use unprefixed properties of RichTextInputAPI
* Inline api to get to RichTextInputAPI
* Join customStyles into RichTextInputAPI
* Export RichTextInput; Remove SetContext
* Address eslint and svelte_check
Issue was introduced in 7922f18296
when the styling was moved into base.scss. From what I can tell, there
are two locations where the current styling is required:
- the editor, to ensure the tags are shown at the bottom
- the change notetype screen, which requires this styling for a sticky
bar at top
I'm no CSS guru, so if someone thinks this could be solved in a better
way, please submit a follow-up PR.
Closes#1782
* Remove background and border from scrollArea
* Fix 1px of background text showing above template header on scroll
I couldn't figure out the reason for this "clipping" issue. What I tried:
- check HTML structure for any elements that might add extra padding/margin
- remove the 1px border of the header
* Adjust spacing to be more in line with rest of UI
* Enable access to old notetype name
* Set minimum height for ChangeNotetypeDialog
* Add bootstrap icons to change-notetype
* Move alert up and make it collapsible
* Tweak some CSS
- Add variables --sticky-bg and --sticky-border to StickyContainer
- Tweak base.css
* Add translatable string "(Nothing)"
* Rework ChangeNotetype screen
* Initially load option at newIndex and remaining options on focus
Optimization for big notetypes:
Should increase efficiency from O(n²) to O(n). Test on notetype with 500 templates shows significant improvement in load time (~10s down to ~1s).
* Try to satisfy rust test
* Change arrow direction depending on reading direction
+ add 0.5em top padding to main
* Create Alert.svelte
* Introduce CSS variable --pane-bg
* Revert "Initially load option at newIndex and remaining options on focus"
This reverts commit f42beee45c27dba9433d76217fb583b117fb5231.
* Final cleanup
* Refine padding/gutter
* Refactor editor css, fix editor button highlight
- Avoid using webview.css
- Move more buttons css into button_mixins
* Fix DropdownItem appearance
* Fix the visuals of tags
* Make dropdown font slightly smaller
* Give SelectOption a background color
* Move some css from deck-options-base to CardStateCustomizer
* Avoid using core.scss for CardStats
* Avoid using sass/core in congrats package
* Inline core.scss into webview.scss
* Include fusion-vars for base.scss
* need to keep core.scss around for now (dae)
