Creation date of the draft Conventions document

[larsbarring]

Currently the creation date of the draft version of the Conventions document is the same as the recentmost released version e.g. today the draft version of CF-1.11 is "version 1.11 draft, 31 August, 2022", even though a PR was merged earlier today.

I imagine that it would be possible to somewhere in the document build process dynamically assign the correct date. But I afraid that the technical aspects for making this happen is out of my reach.

[JonathanGregory]

I suppose that a simple fix for that is simply to delete the date in the working version. It can be replaced with some obvious placeholder, to be filled in when a new release is made. Would that be better?

[erget]

Yes, that could work. Alternatively, we could have a date that is a placeholder in the AsciiDoc and gets turned into a date during build. I think this question is mostly for those responsible for the building, what they prefer.

[larsbarring]

I have played around with this and will shortly create a pull request. In addition to minor changes to the AsciiDoc file, the github workflow for creating the documents have to be slightly modified (details in the PR).

[davidhassell]

Hi Lars,

This looks good to me. I have tested it on my local build, and it looks fine for both HTML and PDF documents.

Might I suggest creating an environment variable for the resolved date that can be used in both HTML and PDF build commands? E.g.

    - name: Set draft date-time formatting
      if: github.event_name != 'release'
      run: |
        echo "docprodtime=-a docprodtime=$(date -u '+%d %B, %Y')" >> "$GITHUB_ENV"
    - name: Set "final" tag and date-time formatting
      if: github.event_name == 'release'
      run: |
        echo "FINAL_TAG=-a final" >> "$GITHUB_ENV"
    # Build cf-conventions.html using the Analog-inc asciidoctor-action
    - name: Build cf-conventions.html
      uses: Analog-inc/asciidoctor-action@v1.2
      with:
        shellcommand: 'asciidoctor --verbose ${FINAL_TAG} ${docprodtime} cf-conventions.adoc -D conventions_build; cp -r images conventions_build'
    # Build cf-conventions.pdf using the Analog-inc asciidoctor-action
    - name: Build cf-conventions.pdf
      uses: Analog-inc/asciidoctor-action@v1.2
      with:
        shellcommand: 'asciidoctor-pdf --verbose ${FINAL_TAG} -a docprodtime="$(date -u ${DATE_FMT})" -d book -a pdf-theme=default-theme-CF-version.yml --trace cf-conventions.adoc -D conventions_build'
    # Upload artifact containing cf-convent

[larsbarring]

Yes, indeed, the environment variable should be used for both builds. And I an see that you are using a more advanced one than I was [able to figure out], which simplifies the asciidoctor arguments.

However, by not creating this variable in the if: github.event_name == 'release' branch it will only work for building the drafts and not when building the final versions (if I am not mistaken ?).

In my version I used slightly different time stamp formats for the draft and final versions. The former included hh:mm:ssZ because I thought that maybe there could possibly be more than one version in one day, but this might very well overdo it. In the final version the time was not included.

[larsbarring]

I experimented a bit with creating the docprodtime environment variable as per your suggestion, but I couldn't get it working in the github workflow (nor locally). Seems that I couldn't get the single and double apostrophes right. As the current versions works I think that it is enough. What do you think @davidhassell ?

[larsbarring]

What works well locally seems not to work on the runner. The following error appears when building both the html and pdf: date: invalid date ''+%d %B, %Y %H:%M:%SZ''

[davidhassell]

Hi Lars, Does the "invalid date" only appear when you introduce the environment variable? If so, then the other version that works is certainly fine by me.

[larsbarring]

It now works, see this screen clip:

The html and pdf documents produced when testing the PR are available for download as a zip file from the bottom of this page: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/actions/runs/6955303266 (only useful for checking the outcome of the change).

The problem went away when I removed the apostrophes in the DATE_FMT assignments. With this I think the PR is ready to merge. @davidhassell would you mind having a final look and then merge if nothing more comes up?

[davidhassell]

Hi Lars, Looks good - merging.