v0.12.1-alpha

[nicotem]

v0.12.1-alpha: the in-QualCoder acceptance checks, run and recorded

Pre-release, documentation only. No code, no tool behaviour and no dependency changed from 0.12.0-alpha; only the version, the citation file and the version canary move. Upgrade with pip install --upgrade qualcoder-mcp if you want the corrected documentation, or stay on 0.12.0-alpha, which behaves identically. Full details: [CHANGELOG](https://github.com/nicotem/qualcoder_mcp/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md).

v0.12.0-alpha shipped with the six in-QualCoder acceptance checks for pseudonymise_source recorded as not run. They have now been run, and this release records what they found.

What was checked, and how

The six checks are the ones only QualCoder itself can make: that the highlights land on the pseudonyms, that the reports print the refreshed quotes, that the case links still cover what they should, that edit mode and its undo behave after a rewrite, and that QualCoder 4.0's AI search index re-indexes the changed text.

They were run headlessly, not by driving a window: QualCoder's own widget code under QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen, with the result read back from the objects QualCoder itself populates (the character ranges and formats of the text document, the report dialog's results, the case file manager's underline ranges, the coding, annotation and case rows after edit mode, and ai_data/search.sqlite). That reads exact character offsets rather than pixels, which is stronger evidence than a screenshot of a highlight.

Result: all six on master 9bddf17, five of six on 3.8.2, and no failure anywhere is attributable to this server. On master the tool passed all six. On 3.8.2 check 6 does not apply, and two of the remaining five record a failure, both of them the upstream defect described below.

• Highlights sit exactly on the pseudonyms and on nothing else: 39 assertions per build, including that nothing is highlighted inside Thomasin and that a hidden coder's rows appear only once that coder is made visible.
• The coded-text report prints the refreshed quote for all eighteen codings, including the hidden coder's, because QualCoder's report reads the base table rather than the visibility view. A search for the real name returns nothing; a search for the pseudonym returns seven segments.
• The annotation report shows the pseudonym at the planted positions. The whole-file case link covers the whole rewritten text and the partial link ends exactly after the pseudonym.
• On master, every row moves by the inserted length when edit mode is left, and the undo restores the pre-edit positions.
• On master with AI enabled, the search index re-indexes on reopen: the stored text hashes change as predicted, the real name falls to zero full-text hits, and Thomasin survives.

What the control measures, stated honestly

Every check was also run against the untouched original project. Roughly half of each step's assertions are bound to the rewritten project and fail there, which is what makes them discriminating; the rest are project invariants that hold either way. The per-step counts are in the acceptance report rather than summarised as one number, because a score of 39 out of 39 should not be read as meaning every assertion discriminates.

One sub-step could not be run headlessly and is recorded as such: pressing undo inside edit mode cannot be exercised, because QualCoder repopulates the editor's undo stack with formatting commands on every undo, in both builds.

Known limitation, upstream and not in this server

QualCoder 3.8.2 deletes whichever coding an edit leaves touching the new end of a file, whenever edit mode is left after any change to the text, and the undo cannot restore it.

ed_update_codings deletes any row whose new end is >= len(text), evaluated against the text after the edit. That is wider than "a coding at the end of the file", and it makes an everyday operation dangerous: trimming the tail of a transcript destroys whichever coding is left nearest the cut, even one that was nowhere near the end before. Measured in the acceptance run: deleting the last 193 characters of a 614-character file destroyed a coding at 400 to 421, which had sat 193 characters clear of the end. Master kept it.

It affects code_text only, in any file; annotations and case links are unaffected, and leaving edit mode without changing anything is harmless. This is upstream 3.8.2 behaviour, present whether or not a project has ever been pseudonymised: the same loss occurs on a project this server never touched, which is how the acceptance control attributes it. The QualCoder 4.0 line has fixed it, clamping such a coding instead of deleting it, with the comment that a coding ending at the file length is valid.

If you use edit mode on QualCoder 3.8.2, this is worth knowing regardless of this server.

Quality gates

The acceptance harness was itself reviewed adversarially, which found and fixed two defects in it before these results were accepted: one assertion whose condition was a literal and so could never fail, and a control claim that overstated what it measured. The release wording was then reviewed again, which corrected the two statements above: the earlier draft understated the 3.8.2 defect and overstated what was run. Both QualCoder source trees were verified byte-identical to genuine upstream at tag 3.8.2 and commit 9bddf17 before any attribution was made.

Suite at the release commit: 3035 passed, 3 skipped, 0 failed, on Python 3.13.5 and 3.11.13; six-platform CI green. Support and bug reports: GitHub Issues only. This remains experimental research software; back up your projects (the server also does, before every write).

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This discussion was created from the release v0.12.1-alpha.