Names of test cases (Was: Halfway to genericizing...)

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

>> is my prior response
> is more Ken Holman commentary

>>We could relax the requirement for the submitted catalog to have the
>>Title element, and possibly "category" values for each test, yet
>>impose on ourselves the requirement that the catalog we ship has them.

>Then I am confused ... I thought "Title" was going to be unique identifier

>given to every test by the submitter.

No, Title is the identifier of the whole suite from a single submitter.
Distinct Title values across all submitted suites is a crucial part of
our naming scheme for the entire merged suite, though.

>The comment in your halfway document read,
>in part, "This must also meet filename constraints: letter first, no
>spaces, 'reasonable' length". In my prototype document I made this an ID
>attribute as that satisfies the constraints as documented, and I made it
>mandatory so that every test has a unique identifier.

Which brings us back to the remark quoted at the top of this message.
There seemed to be some question about whether we should have the
submitter suggest a Title. Since they must be unique across all
submissions, the Committee has to make the final determination of the
Title. This leads to the idea that the Title could be specified once, at
the top level of a submitted catalog, since it's a constant string from
the submitter's point of view. Not so in the merged catalog!

>In the produced
>catalogue, the submitter's unique prefix (assigned by us) is suffixed
>by "_" and the supplied title for the test, to ensure uniqueness of all
>tests in the final catalogue.

Now I see where clarification is needed. The merged catalog needs to
have a Title at sufficient detail level that each case can be named
uniquely across the whole merged catalog. If each submission is
cataloged in the submitter's <test-catalog> element, and our merged
suite is likewise cataloged in our <test-catalog> element, then the
latter must have Title pushed down to the level of each <test-case>
element. Thus the DTD for the merged catalog could differ from the
DTD for submitted catalogs in this regard. (Similarly for category when
a committee wants to do its own categorizing of submitted cases.)

Now let's look at the filenames, using "/" notation. In the merged
suite, every test case is identified by
Title/Identifier
when the current directory is the place where you unpacked the
entire merged suite. That is, the master directory of the merged suite
has several subdirectories named by the <Title>s of the suites that
were submitted to the merge. The <Identifier> includes <Source>, which
is the name of the individual test case. An actual stylesheet file is
most likely named
Title/Identifier.xsl
but we need to discuss this relative to <input-file> elements. At least
you can see why Title must meet filename constraints and why I haven't
said anything about "_" in filenames.

Iron Man and Germanium Man need to split the design of a submitted
catalog and a merged catalog, or else say that the merged catalog has
an outer <master-catalog> element containing several <test-catalog>
elements. I've been leaning toward the former approach.
.................David Marston