Thoughts: Keeping this and DaSL template updated concurrently is not great

jhudsl / OTTR_Template

OTTR for making courses! This is a template repo that helps people write 1 course but publish it in three places

https://www.ottrproject.org/

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Thoughts: Keeping this and DaSL template updated concurrently is not great #80

Closed cansavvy closed 3 years ago

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

With only a few days of having DaSL and this template going, I'm finding the maintenance of both is a bit redundant and I'm worried about something falling through the cracks.

Basically whenever I make a change here I have to make a change over on the DaSL and its not a great system. Not sure how or if there's a way to make this better, but I'm going to write this down in case anyone has ideas.

jtleek commented 3 years ago

I think we urgently need to consolidate the two templates into just the DaSL template and a set of diffs for ITCR. What do you think @carriewright11 @cansavvy

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

I think that's fine with me. I think we found through the process that the differences between the two templates is not actually that much.

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

We could have a separate getting_started.md for ITCR courses vs Others just to make the process more clear?

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

As well as we can make the differences more clear in the BaseCamp template and their associated ToDos.

carriewright11 commented 3 years ago

I like that idea and maybe we can use rmarkdown templates that Katie has been suggesting so that aesthetics can be project specific. I am currently adding most of these with an _output.yml file for bookdown hopefully we could include that in an Rmarkdown template.

carriewright11 commented 3 years ago

could consider submodules if we need to

carriewright11 commented 3 years ago

but I'd rather do that if the other plan doesn't seem to be working

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

Agreed. I'm worried about submodules adding confusion for whenever we have more outside contributors trying to use the template.

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

So for a moving forward plan:

With @KatherineCox input from working with the DaSL template, I think I'll take inventory of how DaSL and ITCR templates are different (I think its mostly text) and I'll draft up different instructions. These instructions will probably partially live in basecamp but maybe a short addendum here.

Once people take a look at my draft of "branching off" instructions, if we feel that that would address the differences adequately, then I will rename this repo as DaSL_Course_Template_Bookdown and delete the current DaSL_Course_Template_Bookdown. (Simply because I have higher confidence this one, the ITCR one, is more up to date).

Then all courses can just start from here.

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

Here's the differences between the DaSL and ITCR template repos:

The README has "ITCR" mentions
_bookdown.yml has "ITCR" mentions
The docker image is either jhudsl/itcr_course_template or jhudsl/course_template (but right now the images themselves are identical and can't foresee a reason they would differ much later.
index.Rmd has an intro paragraph about ITCR as well as the template title Informatics Technology for Cancer Research (ITCR): Course Name
The google slide sets are different.
The logos are different.

These are all pretty simple, I think we could just have one docker image and then keep an alternative versions of:

index.Rmd for ITCR/DaSL.
_output.yml for ITCR/DaSL.
getting_started.md can have links to each ITCR/DaSL google slides templates. The rest a person should be able to figure out just as they are filling out the templates.

cansavvy commented 3 years ago

Last step is https://github.com/jhudsl/ITCR_Course_Template_Leanpub/issues/23 and updatingtransfer-rendered-files.yml then I'll close this issue.