Shepherd changes

Today's upgrade to Shepherd introduced two significant changes.

First, Shepherd now tracks test files on a more individual basis, rather than aggregating all files with the same file name.

Multiple files with the same name _and the same content_ are still aggregated as before, but when the file contents differ, they are treated as separate testing assets (actually as separate branches of the same asset, but still unique tests/references). The distinction is subtle, and most users wont notice a difference, but in the cases where name collisions have happened in the repository you'll now see the files as distinct assets with their own page (and links to the other versions of the files). If you start to see a bunch of hex digits showing up in asset names and URLs, this is why (the numbers are a hash of the contents of the file).

You may notice some changes in the overall test counts as a result of this change. Furthermore, retracted files are no longer part of search results unless explicitly specified (since retracted files don't have contents, they are handled separately).

Second, Shepherd now tracks specification drafts for most of our specs. This allows tests to link to specification anchors that are not present in the officially published version. (The draft specification information is also available via the JSON API.) The rel='help' links in the test files may refer to the /TR version using the draft anchors, or simply refer to the draft specification (especially useful when the spec has not yet reached FPWD). 

Note that when linking to the draft specification, the fully versioned URL must be used, e.g. http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-counter-styles-3/  NOT http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-counter-styles/

There are a lot of tests in the repository that link to draft specifications under the pre-great-renaming URLs, these will be updated shortly as Shepherd does not recognize those URLs.

Peter

Received on Monday, 20 May 2013 04:16:07 UTC