Unified exercise management

This repository is meant to facilitate the development and maintenance of courses which:

• May change year-to-year
• May share some exercises

The idea is to manage all the exercises in a single place, and have them deployed to the target repository of each course.

How-to

Add a new exercise

Phase 1: design a program

The initial development happens on the master branch, which contains the solutions.

Make sure you are on the master branch!

git branch | grep '*'

Develop your exercise as a solution. When you are satisfied, commit and push.

Phase 2: design an exercise

Now, prepare the exercise. Write the instructions and modify the code as you see fit. Then, only commit the instructions, and push. Once done, run git stash. Your edits will disappear from the worktree, but that is okay (they are safe in the stash).

Phase 3: design an exercise

In a few seconds after the push, you should find a copy of your solution in the remote branch exercises on origin. Remotely, there is in fact a workflow which keeps the branches syncronized. Checkout the exercises branch:

git checkout exercises

pull from origin/exercises:

git pull --rebase=true origin exercises

(note: with a sane configuration of git git pull should suffice)

You should now see your exercise copied from master if you do not, there are two cases, and you can figure out which one it is by taking a look at the dashboard:

1. The pipeline is not finished yet. Just wait until it's finished and then pull again.
2. The pipeline failed. In this case, run git merge master, fix the merge conflicts, and then push.

Either way, at this point you have your solution on exercises with instructions, and it is just a matter of adding the changes to make your solution an exercise; but you did that already! It's just matter of.

git stash pop

Fix any conflict that may arise (though none should), then commit, and push to exercises.

Modify an existing solution

Edit the solution on master, then commit and push.

Modify an existing exercise's instructions file

Edit the instructions on master, then commit and push.

Modify the structure of an exercise

1. Edit the instructions and the exercise on master
2. Commit only the instructions, push, and stash the remainder of the changes
3. Checkout exercises
4. git pull until you have the new instructions
5. git stash pop
6. Commit and push

Prepare a new lab

A lab is a collection of exercises that is deployed with two zip files (one for the exercises, one for the solution) or as a repository (with a branch exercises and a branch solutions)

The labs are configured in config.yml.