Re: Website update

[John W. Eaton]

On 11/15/2016 03:10 PM, siko1056 wrote:
> John W. Eaton wrote
> > Could you also provide instructions for how to update the web site?
>
> They are available from https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/README.md

Thanks.

I was looking to update the community news page and noticed that it is 
now automatically generated from some other source (I'm still not sure 
exactly where, as I don't completely follow the dependencies yet).

In the README.md file, I see

  The Octave News are currently very widespread
  (and **individually maintained!**) at:
  - https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ (excerpt for the start page)
  - https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/news.html (some archive)
  - https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/community-news.html (excerpt 
for the
    Octave GUI)
  - https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/fixes-4.0.x.html (here are many 
more
    to come!)
  - http://wiki.octave.org/GNU_Octave_Wiki#News (some excerpt, anyone 
can edit)

I agree that it is usually undesirable to have multiple independently 
maintained sources for the same information.

However, I wouldn't really count the news item on the wiki, at least as 
it currently exists, since it simply mentions the release.  Probably the 
wiki news item should just point to the NEWS page on the web site.

Also, I would like to maintain the community news page separately from 
the  other news.  It is really only intended to be displayed in the GUI. 
 There don't need to be any other links to it and it may be used to 
pass along information to users that doesn't belong on the NEWS page of 
the web site.

For the GUI to display the community-news.html file, the serial number 
in the header must be incremented (yes, I probably should have made a 
note of that in the .in file).  As far as I can tell, that hasn't 
happened for the current release, so people who have existing 
installations of Octave probably haven't seen the release announcement.

To fix that, I modified the file _layouts/community-news.html and 
executed the jekyll build command and it seems to have updated the 
_site/community-news.html file.  Then I updated the CVS directory and 
compared my newly generated _site/community-news.html file with the one 
in the CVS archive.  There were more differences than just the serial 
number (see the attached diffs.txt file).  Why is that happening?  Is it 
a difference in the version of tools?  I'm using a Debian system and it 
looks like I have Jekyll version 3.1.6+dfsg-3.

Even though updating the web site is just a single command, maybe it 
would make sense to have a Makefile for that?  Also, to deploy the web 
site requires a lot more complicated stuff that could probably go in a 
Makefile rule.  At least for me, it's much more obvious to look in a 
Makefile for rules about building something than to search for a list of 
commands to copy and paste to execute.  Maybe we could even ignore the 
fact that we have to use CVS if we used a Makefile rule to do the deploy 
step.  It could checkout to a temporary directory, update the files, 
commit changes, and delete the temporary directory.

jwe

diffs.txt
Description: Text document