Subplot → blog → 2024 → Subplot 0.10.0 released

The Subplot project announces the 0.10.0 release of the tool for documenting acceptance criteria and verifying them automatically. See below for a summary of changes in this release, and NEWS.md in the git repository for release notes for all releases.

Version 0.10.0, released 2024-06-15

It has been a long time since the previous release. Due to life and work commitments, our work on Subplot has had to be put on a lower priority. However, some things have happened.

  • HTML output is now more technically correct HTML5 rather than just something that seems to render more or less OK in whatever browser Lars has handy. To start with, it’s explicitly declared as HTML5 by the DOCTYPE. A number of fixes has been made to the HTML, and the test suite now verifies the correctness with the html-tidy tool. There is now a table of contents, and at least basic tables work. The CSS provided by Subplot has also been changed, and is now less of a prototype. (We’d love to have help making the output more readable, more accessible, and more stylish.)

  • Subplot now requires bindings files to have documentation for each binding (overridden by --merciful), and warns if the name or type of a capture is missing. We generate documentation for the step libraries provided by Subplot, and publish it at https://doc.subplot.tech/libdocs/. Further, when a binding has an error, the error message now tells the user what file the binding came from.

  • The fledgling “Subplot book” (in the book directory and published at https://doc.subplot.tech/user-guide.html) now defines the terminology we use to discuss “needs”, “acceptance criteria”, and “requirements”.

Bug fixes:

  • In the Rust implementation of the lib/files step library, when a file is overwritten, it is first truncated. Previously, we were only writing the new content over the beginning of the file, which could result in parts of the old content remaining at the end of the file.

Related to development of Subplot itself:

  • We’ve re-enabled testing against chosen old versions of Subplot (specifically, 0.9.0) so that we are less likely to accidentally break backwards compatibility.

  • We now require contributors to add a Signed-off-by footer in git commit messages to signal the commit meets the assertion for a Developer Certificate of Origin. See the the DECISIONS.md file in the source tree.

  • We’ve update Subplot’s minimum supported Rust version (MSRV) to 1.75 in line with Debian testing a the time of the update.