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What does --write-history actually change about future heals?

sdods heal report -p storefront --write-history

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• Accepted answer

  Small, and yes.

  The flag writes heal-history.json beside the artifacts directory, holding one entry per heal description with its success and failure counts and the strategy and selector that last worked. On the next run, a candidate whose strategy and selector match a remembered winner gets a bonus of successes over total, scaled by 0.1 and capped there, added after the multipliers.

  So the most it can ever do is lift a candidate by a tenth. In practice that matters in exactly one place: it lets a candidate that keeps landing just short of minScore clear it, and it breaks ties between two otherwise equal candidates. It cannot promote a CSS candidate above the default threshold, and it cannot make a candidate that matches nothing win, because a zero count is a zero score before the bonus is added.

  Reversible: delete the file. A missing or corrupt one is ignored rather than fatal, and the counts rebuild the next time you run with the flag.

  The bias is keyed on strategy and selector, not on the description alone. Change the selector the element is found by and the history stops applying to it, which is what you want after a rename.

  TBanswered by Tomas BrekkeSDODS team

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