Catalog items

[dometto]

I wanted to create a nice table listing our catalog items, but markdown tables are hell. So I ended up creating yaml files with catalog item definitions and using python in Quarto to render these. I'm not sure this is the most maintainable way to go: we could alose use this to render the initial table and edit manually after that? @jelletreep what do you think would be better?

(NB: this is work in progress, some info needs to be checked, and more links need to be added.)

[jelletreep]

Great work @dometto ! I think the combination of yml with python snippet is a good approach to make this easier than typing everything in markdown. I am thinking if we can make it somewhat easier to maintain if we can bundle in some way the documentation per catalog item, since it might be a bit cumbersome to having to create/edit three files per catalog item (developer documentation, user documentation, table information), but so far no idea to make this more efficient.

Also we might want to think how we can make the table easier to understand:

• abbreviations are probably not always well known
• The data management options might be a bit confusing, in most cases there is a way to work with all data storage platforms, but in some workspaces it is easier to work with some of the platforms. Webdav, icommands some people will not know what this is. People might just want to know if they can work with either Yoda, Researchdrive, Surfdrive, etc. with an easy to use client or 'complex' command line tools (icommands, rclone). maybe with trafficlight colors and columns per storage platform? Green is client, orange is command line tools, red is not possible (red will hardly ever happen)

[dometto]

I am thinking if we can make it somewhat easier to maintain if we can bundle in some way the documentation per catalog item, since it might be a bit cumbersome to having to create/edit three files per catalog item (developer documentation, user documentation, table information), but so far no idea to make this more efficient.

That's a great suggestion, maybe we can do this by adding the relevant info to each page's frontmatter, and parsing all pages' frontmatter to generate the table. I'll give that a try!

And thanks for the feedback on the abbrevations/information in the table. 👍