How to update existing birds with latest from Cookiecutter template?

[cehbrecht]

Description

We consistently improve the template while we are using the WPS birds. What could be ways to update existing birds with the improvements?

Environment

• Cookiecutter version used, if any:
• Python version, if any:
• Operating System:

Steps to Reproduce

Additional Information

[cehbrecht]

Collecting ideas ...

It could be helpful to keep the cookiecutter settings to re-run the cookiecutter. The generated bird can be compared with the existing bird using (git) diff.

[cehbrecht]

We can identify what needs to be updated:

• docs:
  Common docs could be shared (dev guide, ...) and just referenced by the individual bird docs.
• Makefile:
  We can have a shared Makefile on github which gets pulled with make self-update.
• test setup:
  An improved test-setup could be part of pywps.
• Dockerfile
• ...

[cehbrecht]

See also for improving test-suite:
bird-house/bird-house.github.io#28
bird-house/birdy#67

[huard]

I was thinking more of a git command. Something like : go back to the original cookie-cutter commit, create the new version then apply all the other changes.

[cehbrecht]

we may have a template branch for a bird where we can regenerated the cookiecutter bird from time to time. With git diff/merge/cherry-pick one can update the "real" bird on master.

[huard]

I think that the procedure would then look like this:

git co -b orig_cookiecutter_update <SHA of the first commit>
git clean -fxd
# Run cookie-cutter with extra context arguments reflecting how it was called the first time.
git add * 
git add */.*
git ci -m 'update cookiecutter template'
git co -b cookiecutter_update master
git merge orig_cookiecutter_update

@cehbrecht One issue is that the date is going to be updated, because the jinja template uses the current date. This will screw the CHANGES.rst file

-0.1.0 (2018-04-16)
+0.1.0 (2020-01-10)

Cookiecutter should probably then take the date as an argument, so we can pass the original date of creation.

[cehbrecht]

We could tune the template more to avoid potential conflicts when updating with the script in PR #79.