FW: [tag-comment] Dealing with spec versions in TAs (and metadata)

["Durand, Jacques R." <JDurand@us.fujitsu.com>]

FYI

-----Original Message-----
From: david_marston@us.ibm.com [mailto:david_marston@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 8:01 AM
To: tag-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: Durand, Jacques R.; stephen.green@documentengineeringservices.com
Subject: [tag-comment] Dealing with spec versions in TAs (and metadata)

I see in Stephen's latest missive ("Editorial Memo: Multiple
specifications, etc") that you want better text about versions and how
to handle multiple versions in the TAs. Please recall my email to the
comment list dated 5 March 2008. I brought to your attention a mechanism
we (OASIS XSLT testing TC) defined for test case metadata that could
apply equally well to test assertions.

>3. There is a placeholder for "Identifying Versions" in 3.2. I think 
>the
first paragraph should point out that while a spec document is produced
anew for each version, that does not require that a set of TAs be
produced anew. The TAs can cross several spec versions as long as they
have the proper version data. 

>Back when I was working on the OASIS TC on XSLT conformance testing, we
devised two separate values: 
VersionAdd: the lowest numerical version to which the test applies. 
(Absence of this value implies the default of 1.0)
VersionDrop: if present, it is a number higher than VersionAdd (or 1.0)
and indicates the lowest version number to which the test does NOT
apply. 
Numbering it this way allows a version like 2.3 to be issued after 3.0
without disturbing cases that no longer apply as of 3.0. If we had
instead used the highest-number version to which it does apply, in this
example we might have given the value 2.2 to those cases that would not
apply to 3.0, but the cases may well have applied to 2.3, when 2.3 was
issued.

I hope that helps you resolve the issue.
.................David Marston