Re: Major unannounced Specberus updates wrecking publishing

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 1:16 PM Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org> wrote:
> The changes to the templates were circulated in August:
>   https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/2021JulSep/0015.html
>
> https://github.com/w3c/tr-design is where the changes were worked on.

That is... absolutely not sufficient of an explanation/warning about
what's going on. I'd have to diff the templates myself and divine
which changes are incidental and which are actually going to be
checked by Specberus, and how. I'd also have to do so at some
arbitrary point in the future after that announcement, given that it
was sent in mid-August and the Specberus update only happened now, two
and a half months later, with no additional announcement (and
many/most of the changes would have previously made the document
*invalid*, so I couldn't have anticipated them in the code anyway).

For these sorts of changes to be addressable by generators, we need an
actual list of the changes going into the specberus checker. Can we
commit to such a list being sent to spec-prod in the future, with a
sufficient lead time for updates to be done?

> I was hoping to get time to help on the bikeshed front prior to November
> 2 but ended up not being able to.

That's fine, but that means the changes should not have been pushed
public. What we have right now is a terrible experience for spec
writers trying to publish, due to no fault of their own. I'm going to
work on these fixes, but for now the public instance of Specberus
should be reverted to before the November change, until generators can
be caught up.

Can we commit to, in the future, coordinating all Specberus changes
with the spec-authoring tools, so they can go live at the same time in
both generators and checkers?

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 9 November 2021 21:25:42 UTC