Hosting the test suite

Hi all,

for a variety of reasons, many of which have to do with how much of an 
outstanding system administrator I am, we're looking at resetting the 
server that currently holds w3c-test.org.

Since there are a number of things that are inelegant with the current 
setup, I've been thinking that this could be a good opportunity to take 
a few minutes to think about how we'd actually like it to be properly 
set up.

Current problems include:

   • There is a bunch of stuff being served under w3c-test.org that is 
entirely unrelated to the testing effort. This is mostly from people who 
were hosting their work on the hg server but needed it to be 
auto-exported somewhere to be served on the Web.

   • There is a number of outdated test suites that are still hosted there.

   • The WPT isn't just served from the root, which would be nicer.

   • The way in which we expose master, CR, and submissions could be nicer.

At this point I'm not promising that we can do absolutely anything we 
want — I want to check everything with the systeam — but I'd like to get 
a feel for what we prefer in order to see what we can work out.

I'm assuming that we're sticking with w3c-test.org as a domain, but I 
wonder if it may be the occasion to merge with the TestTWF brand in some 
way. So I'll just list this as $domain below.

Here's a strawman, burn at will. We would:

   • Keep all the stuff that isn't ours where it is on w3c-test.org. We 
can't really break other people's things. At least, not without them 
yelling at us, which can get tedious.

   • Serving from the root would save us from the somewhat tangled mess 
of relative links that we currently have, which requires a fair bit of 
maintenance when things move and is in part held together with symlinks, 
redirects, and pieces of gum.

   • Of course, that requires that we have different subdomains for each 
variant. This could be:

       - www.$domain redirects to $domain
       - $domain is a simple page of docs, with pointers to all the 
relevant info
       - master.$domain is the master branch
       - cr.$domain is the CR branch
       - subNNN.$domain is there for each submission

Thoughts?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2013 14:14:10 UTC