Repo redundancy and splitting

[agroener]

@wking I was a bit curious when I saw this go up. Is there a reason why this repo exists? Within DrexelPhysics/DissertationDocs, we already have all of the source files (see: https://github.com/DrexelPhysics/DissertationDocs/tree/master/Templates).

To avoid confusion about what template should be used, we could either:

1. Completely scrap the location I've set up and go with this.
2. Incorporate your stuff into what I already have.

I would prefer choice #2, simply because everything has been organized this way.

[thoppe]

Personally, I'm OK with keeping them separate. @wking has done most of the work for the templates and it would be cleaner to keep them separate, especially if he wants to maintain them. DissertationDocs should be for the examples, while this one is simply for the template itself.

It also is worth nothing that this repo is small and easy to manage while DissertationDocs is huge in file size. A new student who wants to start playing around with it could start with this and download the full thesis when looking for complete examples.

[wking]

On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 06:11:25AM -0700, Austen Groener wrote:

@wking I was a bit curious when I saw this go up. Is there a reason
why this repo exists? Within DrexelPhysics/DissertationDocs, we
already have all of the source files (see:
https://github.com/DrexelPhysics/DissertationDocs/tree/master/Templates).

@rcanzanese mentioned that he had some patches for the class and
wanted to submit them via GitHub, so I'm just mirroring the repository
that I've always self-hosted 1 here.

To avoid confusion about what template should be used, we could
either:

1. Completely scrap the location I've set up and go with this.
2. Incorporate your stuff into what I already have.

I would prefer choice #2, simply because everything has been
organized this way.

I discussed this briefly with @thoppe in October, and my feelings are:

1. The examples in DissertationDocs are excellent, but they take a lot
   of space. I'd rather keep them outside of the drexel-thesis
   development repository to keep the development repository focused
   on the class itself and some minimal examples that only demonstrate
   its features. Folks should refer to the DissertationDocs examples
   for ideas on handling problems that are bigger than just “what are
   the features of the drexel-thesis class”. For example, image
   layout, directory organization, build tooling, ….

2. The class source is under the LaTeX Project Public License v1.3+,
   so anyone who wants to is free to redistribute the complete,
   unmodified source or compiled versions wherever they like. That
   means you can keep the snapshots in the DissertationDocs repository
   if you want. If it's easier for you, you can also cut them out and
   just point people at my repositories (1 and this mirror) and
   compiled tarballs ([2,3]) which I'll continue to maintain.

If theres anything there that doesn't sound right, I'm happy to kick
this around some more. Just let me know where the friction-points
are.

[thoppe]

@wking The only thing I suggest is putting a link to each of the repos respectively so a casual user knows that the other one exists.

[agroener]

Yea, actually this sounds like a good idea. I didn't really think that the size of the full repo would present much of a problem, but I could see it becoming a problem as more theses go up in the future. Currently, the full repo is ~200 MB - I'm sure mostly due to images ;-)

Okay, and I also see that there are ways to obtain previous versions of the template, which is what I was about to ask.

Here's what I think:

1. I agree with what you've said regarding also including the template files within the DissertationDocs project. If people decide they want everything in one go, this will allow them to do just that. I don't really intend on doing any development on the template myself. I'm hoping that updating this location won't be neglected.
2. @wking I don't know how open you are to the idea of changing the name of the repo. The only reason why I bring this up is because it isn't immediately obvious that it is in fact the place to go for the template. The same could be said about "DissertationDocs", but within it, I tried to be explicit about what the folders are named. We could rename it: "drexel-thesis-template", or something like that.
3. I agree with @thoppe - we should make mention of DissertationDocs from within drexel-thesis, in order to point people to full thesis examples. And we should make mention of drexel-thesis from within DissertationDocs, to look for information regarding the template (that one would simply have to deduce from the examples).

Thanks for the clarification guys! Keep me posted about what everyone decides to do. I think I might leave this issue open until people tell me to close it. I don't want to kill any useful conversations.

[thoppe]

The conversation will stay archived as an issue and should show up in
searches. There is no reason not to close it once we reach a consensus.
Unless anybody else weighs in a few days we should go ahead with what we
have here, a separate small repo for the template and a large archive of
everyone's full thesis.

Can we get a link on the physics homepage to the repo?

On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Austen Groener [email protected]
wrote:

Yea, actually this sounds like a good idea. I didn't really think that the
size of the full repo would present much of a problem, but I could see it
becoming a problem as more theses go up in the future. Currently, the full
repo is ~200 MB - I'm sure mostly due to images ;-)

Okay, and I also see that there are ways to obtain previous versions of
the template, which is what I was about to ask.

Here's what I think:

1. I agree with what you've said regarding also including the template
   files within the DissertationDocs project. If people decide they want
   everything in one go, this will allow them to do just that. I don't really
   intend on doing any development on the template myself. I'm hoping that
   updating this location won't be neglected.
2. @wking https://github.com/wking I don't know how open to the idea of
   changing the name of the repo. The only reason why I bring this up is
   because it isn't immediately obvious that it is in fact the place to go for
   the template. The same could be said about "DissertationDocs", but within
   it, I tried to be explicit about what the folders are named.
3. I agree with @thoppe https://github.com/thoppe - we should make
   mention of DissertationDocs from within drexel-thesis, to find full
   examples. And we should make mention of drexel-thesis from within
   DissertationDocs, to look for information regarding the template (that one
   would simply have to deduce from the examples).

Thanks for the clarification guys! Keep me posted about what everyone
decides to do. I think I might leave this issue open until people tell me
to close it. I don't want to kill any useful conversations.

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[wking]

On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 06:40:39PM -0700, Travis Hoppe wrote:

The only thing I suggest is putting a link to each of the repos…

Link added in 5b137e5 (README.rst: Link to the long-form examples in
DissertationDocs, 2015-05-03).

[wking]

On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 06:45:14PM -0700, Austen Groener wrote:

1. I agree with what you've said regarding also including the
   template files within the DissertationDocs project. If people decide
   they want everything in one go, this will allow them to do just
   that. I don't really intend on doing any development on the template
   myself. I'm hoping that updating this location won't be neglected.

I'll ping you if/when I cut future releases in drexel-thesis, so you
can update your vendored copy.

2. @wking I don't know how open to the idea of changing the name of
   the repo.

It's been drexel-thesis since I started version controlling in
e8f3411 (Began versioning, 2010-01-09), so it's probably too late to
change it now ;).

The only reason why I bring this up is because it isn't immediately
obvious that it is in fact the place to go for the template. The
same could be said about "DissertationDocs", but within it, I tried
to be explicit about what the folders are named.

Cross-links from the READMEs should cover that.

[agroener]

@wking Is there a changelog perhaps? It would be nice to know what template features were introduced for each version.

[wking]

On Sat, May 09, 2015 at 08:57:24AM -0700, Austen Groener wrote:

Is there a changelog perhaps? It would be nice to know what template
features were introduced for each version.

Well, there's the commit history [1,2]. And then the manual [3,4] has
a “Change History” section in the back highlighting the important
changes and what version they landed in.

[agroener]

Okay - I suppose it is all there. It would still be nice to have a changelog file within the repo, so people don't have to go hunting this information down (maybe in the form of a nice markdown file).

Question, though - and this could be due to my lack of understanding in how to software versions are generally numbered. Is the latest version of the template v0.9? If so, in the 'templates' folder of DissertationDocs, I only have up to v0.15, which is a major problem.

[wking]

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 03:24:22PM -0700, Austen Groener wrote:

Question, though - and this could be due to my lack of understanding
in how to software versions are generally numbered. Is the latest
version of the template v0.9? If so, in the 'templates' folder of
DissertationDocs, I only have up to v0.15, which is a major problem.

No 0.15 is the most recent version (15 > 9). They're just sorted
alphabetically (“9” > “1”) in the manual because I haven't dug into
how to fix that yet ;).