Re: [whatwg] URL interop status and reference implementation demos

From: whatwg [mailto:whatwg-bounces@lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of James Graham

> That sounds like unnecessary complexity to me. It means that random third party contributers need to know which repository to submit changes to if they edit the urld testata file. It also means that we have to recreate all the infrastructure we've created around web-platform-tests for the URL repo.
>
> Centralization of the test repository has been a big component of making contributing to testing easier, and I would be very reluctant to special-case URL here.

Hmm. I see your point, but it conflicts with what I consider a best practice of having the test code and spec code (and reference implementation code) in the same repo so that they co-evolve at the exact same pace. Otherwise you have to land multi-sided patches to keep them in sync, which inevitably results in the tests falling behind. And worse, it discourages the practice of not making any spec changes without any accompanying test changes.

That's why for streams the tests live in the repo, and are run against the reference implementation every commit, and every change to the spec is accompanied by changes to the reference implementation and the tests. I couldn't imagine being able to maintain that workflow if the tests lived in another repo.

Received on Wednesday, 19 November 2014 16:03:07 UTC