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/rm36810.docent.yaml src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm36810.docent.yaml
index ff0a10574e1..a02859c7b51 100644
--- src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm36810.docent.yaml
+++ src/hg/utils/docent/tests/regress/rm36810.docent.yaml
@@ -1,44 +1,47 @@
 # #36810 -- trackDb's `urls` statement stopped turning data fields into links.
 #
 # ClinVar's trackDb carries
 #
 #     urls rcvAcc="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/$$/" geneId=".../gene/$$" ...
 #
 # and hgc is supposed to substitute the item's own field value for $$ and print a link.
 # Something between v487 and v491 broke that, so the accessions were printed as plain text
 # and the reader had nowhere to go. Reported by Lou off #36808, fixed for v492.
 #
 # The assertion is the HREF, which is a value the browser BUILT from the data, not text it
 # copied. That is what separates this from the rest of the suite: almost everything else
 # here says a row was drawn or a page carries no error, and would be just as happy with an
 # accession printed as dead text.
 #
 # It asks for RCV specifically, not merely for a link to NCBI. Every ClinVar hgc page has
 # NCBI links in its description and boilerplate, so `a[href*="ncbi.nlm.nih.gov"]` would
 # pass on the broken page too. /clinvar/RCV can only be there if an rcvAcc field went
 # through the substitution.
 #
 # Nothing here names a variant. ClinVar is rebuilt every month and an accession that is on
 # the page today may not be next time, so the item is taken by POSITION -- the box nearest
 # the middle of a window in BRCA2 that is thick with variants -- and the assertion is on
 # the SHAPE of the accession rather than on any particular one.
 #
 # has: rather than text:, because a href is not page text. This is the same reason rm38126
 # uses it, from the other direction: there the thing asserted was absent from innerText, here
 # it never appears in innerText at all.
+proof:
+  - "assertion-only 2026-09-06 -- written from the ticket after the fix had shipped"
+
 target: genome-test
 db: hg38
 position: chr13:32396673-32400065
 reset: true
 fast: true
 steps:
   - go: chr13:32396673-32400065
   - hide: all
   - track: {clinvarMain: pack}
   - expect: {rows: [clinvarMain], noText: "Warning/Error"}
 
   - click: {track: clinvarMain, frac: 0.5}
   - expect: {url: "hgc", noText: "Warning/Error"}
 
   - expect: {has: 'a[href*="ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/RCV"]'}
   - expect: {has: 'a[href*="ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/"]'}