4697bbddd881c72cccb85b9ff0aacd769396b9d0
braney
  Thu Sep 10 07:34:35 2026 -0700
docent: record what evidence each regression test has, and count it

A regression test written after the fix asserts the right answer, but nobody
has watched it fail for the reason it exists, and a loose assertion in that
state is indistinguishable from no test at all. Four of the 37 scripts here
have actually been watched to flip. That was recorded only as prose in each
script's header, so answering "how many of these are real regression tests"
meant a grep and a read, and the number could not be quoted.

Every script now carries a top-level `proof:` key, one quoted line per piece
of evidence, `<level> <YYYY-MM-DD> -- <what was seen>`. docent.js reads only
the keys it names off the parsed document, so this costs a run nothing.

tests/proof.js reads them and tallies, wired up as `make proof` in the shared
docentTest.mk. It exits 1 on a malformed line, an unknown level, or a line
left unquoted -- that last one because nearly every note names a ticket and a
bare # in an unquoted YAML scalar silently truncates the sentence at the
ticket number, which is how the first pass of this change lost half its text.

The levels, weakest first: assertion-only, xfail, sandbox-ab, server-flip,
caught-regression. Today that reads 31 / 2 / 0 / 3 / 1.

nightly.sh now records the flips it finds. An xfail that PASSES is the best
evidence this suite produces -- the same server, the same fixtures, the same
script, one real build apart -- and until now it arrived as a red mail and was
thrown away with the log 60 days later. It is appended to
/hive/users/braney/docentNightly/flips.log, one line per script ever, outside
the checkout because --update resets the tree. The mail says what to do with
it. The three flips that already happened (rm38272 2026-09-06, rm36212
2026-09-09, rm38310 2026-09-10) were recovered from the old logs and seeded
there by hand.

Full suite run after the change: 37 scripts, all ok. refs #38252

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

diff --git src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm27113.docent.yaml src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm27113.docent.yaml
index 5ac4dae5793..dd92c272e04 100644
--- src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm27113.docent.yaml
+++ src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm27113.docent.yaml
@@ -25,30 +25,33 @@
 #     click 3    155,806,199-155,806,201      3 bases   centre 155,806,200
 #
 # A one-base drift at any click moves every window after it, and the last one is three
 # bases wide, so there is nowhere for it to hide. Each click is asserted separately so a
 # failure names the click that drifted rather than only the end of the chain.
 #
 # This is one of the two scripts here that does anything more than once (rm36805 is the
 # other). A drift of one base per click is not something anyone would file after a single
 # gesture; it is the accumulation that people saw, and a straight-line script cannot see it.
 #
 # raw: true, with no item name, is a bare point on a row. The ruler carries no hgc map boxes
 # at all, so docent's ordinary item click has nothing to follow and this is the only way to
 # express the gesture.
 #
 # Fixed and on the RR on 2026-07-28, so there is no build left to watch this fail on.
+proof:
+  - "assertion-only 2026-09-06 -- written from the ticket after the fix had shipped"
+
 target: genome-test
 db: hg38
 position: chr7:155806151-155806250
 reset: true
 fast: true
 steps:
   - go: chr7:155806151-155806250
   - expect: {rows: [ruler], text: "chr7:155,806,151-155,806,250"}
 
   - click: {track: ruler, frac: 0.5, raw: true}
   - expect: {text: "chr7:155,806,184-155,806,216"}
 
   - click: {track: ruler, frac: 0.5, raw: true}
   - expect: {text: "chr7:155,806,195-155,806,205"}