SpecInfra

SpecInfra is composed of two open source projects (specref and pr-preview) which power hosted services and a GitHub application. This enables:

• The Specref database service, which contains thousands of references of standards and is automatically updated hourly. Sprecref is used by Bikeshed and ReSpec to reference all standards, but also by other projects, notably around web-platform-tests.
• specref.org, which allows searching Specref really easily,
• The PR-Preview app, which builds specs everytime a pull request is created and generates HTML diffs of pull requests against the current Editor's draft. This has saved countless engineering hours and has help foster a culture of contributing to standards by making pull requests way easier to author and review.

Keeping these services up and running takes time and resources. There are also plenty of improvements that could be made to the services but aren't for lack of time.

What will your contributions enable?

Maintenance for both projects

• keeping the Specref and PR-Preview services up,
• keeping specref.org up and running,
• applying security patches,
• dependency updates,
• answering support issues and emails,
• keeping the reference database up to date,
• AWS bills,
• domain name bills,
• Heroku hosting expenses (currently sponsored by Heroku),
• responding to outages,
• liaising with the other service providers (Bikeshed, W3C Labs, Wattsi),
• merging pull requests,
• answering related requests,
• code changes required to keep the services humming,
• 1:1 support at TPAC,
• create a dedicated Slack and/or irc channel,
• etc.

Improvements to PR-Preview

• move the project to the specinfra GitHub org,
• support for multiple specs per repo (e.g. for CSSWG),
• handling images,
• handling local biblio,
• handling BikeShed includes,
• enable retriggering the build by commenting on the issue,
• update all PRs when .pr-preview.json is first added,
• support for TC39 specs,
• dedicated domain names instead of S3 instance,
• automatic build and publication of the main branch each time a pull request is merged (maybe that's a separate app).

Improvements to Specref:

• move the project to the specinfra GitHub org,
• better version handling,
• checking specs directly to surface 404s or outdated specs,
• additional data about specs (e.g. test suites),
• etc.

Additionally, I'll host a TPAC technical plenary session to discuss the roadmap for both Specref and PR-Preview roadmap and answer questions.