petertseng
commented
5 years ago Will you allow me to interject with a short point of order about the commit message? That is to say, if there is anything in that link that should be preserved in history, it would probably be better to amend the commit message and put that information directly in there.
More exposition below, but if you're already on board with that idea then you don't need to read the below.
Following the link given in the commit message, https://exercism-team.slack.com/archives/GC3K95MRR/p1557390406008000 , shows me the message "There’s been a glitch… We’re not quite sure what went wrong. You can go back, or try looking on our Help Center if you need a hand."
As some may know, a free plan has a limit on the number of messages back in history that may be viewed.
Given the above reasons that appear to limit the availability of information, it seems valuable to at least amend the commit message and at least provide a summary of the discussion/rationale directly.
If there's zero relevant information and the commit rationale is expected to be self-evident from its content (we can guess that the default rationale for "improve documentation for X" would have been "a discussion revealed that someone wishes they could better understand X") I suppose no change is required, but it is still good to explicitly make that clear instead of potentially losing the knowledge that there is no extra knowledge.
rpottsoh
iHiD
As per this discussion on Slack: https://exercism-team.slack.com/archives/GC3K95MRR/p1557390406008000
coriolinus [May 9th at 4:26 AM] Does anyone here know exactly what the distinction between
deprecatedandforegoneexercises is? There's some discussion in https://github.com/exercism/rust/pull/830 which revolves around the semantics of those terms, and it would be good to have an understanding of the overall team intent. (edited) 11 repliesNobbZ [23 days ago]
deprecatedexercises have been implemented in this track previously but shall not be served to students anymore. Their implementation is usually kept in the repository for historical reasons. Also students know those exist could download those exercises through the CLI.foregoneexercises are not implemented in the track and probably will never because they do not make sense in the context of the track. There is no implementation for those available.coriolinus [23 days ago] If an exercise is deprecated, and the track maintainers remove the
exercises/fooimplementation, and a student attempts to get the exercise with the CLI, what happens?NobbZ [23 days ago] I have no clue. But
configlet lintshould fail if an exercise is deprecated and not available IIRC.coriolinus [23 days ago] it does! And that's been the cause of some issues for Rust recently, because it wasn't otherwise documented that deprecated exercises must have their implementations preserved. It looked like configlet was improperly failing to ignore implementation checks for deprecated exercises, instead of properly ensuring they stuck around for posterity.
Do you suppose that it would be acceptable to redefine things such that students can no longer download deprecated exercises from the CLI?
NobbZ [23 days ago] No
NobbZ [23 days ago] Sometimes I like to (re)do them (edited)
ihid [23 days ago] Deleting an exercise would delete everyone's solutions (foreign key constraints etc). So deprecated exists to be non destructive but also to imply that maintainers will no longer be updating/supporting that exercise.
coriolinus [23 days ago] Ok, this clarifies things. Thanks all!
It would be very nice if this were part of the public maintainer documentation, but that's probably not a particularly high priority.
ihid [23 days ago] Where would this go?
coriolinus [23 days ago] not sure. Probably https://github.com/exercism/docs/blob/master/language-tracks/configuration/track.md or https://github.com/exercism/docs/blob/master/language-tracks/configuration/configlet.md language-tracks/configuration/configlet.md exercism/docsAdded by GitHub