Numeric Course Repo Refactoring Experiment

The initial experiment of creating a repo with a single-truth copy of the notebooks and related modules, images, PDFs, etc. was a success:

• The website/ tree is auto-published to GitHub Pages via an on-push GitHub Actions workflow and the gh-pages branch.
• Instructors can edit the lab notebooks and code modules in the notebooks/ and numlabs/ trees.
• Students can:
  • fork the repo on GitHub and clone their for to their laptops
  • set up an upstream remote to allow them to pull updates from the instructor-maintained repo
  • create personally named copies of the lab notebooks to avoid merge conflicts with updates from upstream
  • commit their changes and push them to their GitHub forks

Next steps:

• Pull the rest of the content from numeric_2022 into this repo
• Do the stuff flowing from answers in the Questions section below
• Transfer the "ready enough for day 1" repo to Rachel's ownership on GitHub
• Tidy up notebook rendering and mark-up issues

See https://github.com/users/douglatornell/projects/1/views/4?layout=board for details.

Features

Completed:

• conda environment: envs/environment.yaml
• pre-commit hooks: .pre-commit-config.yaml
  • delete trailing whitespace
  • ensure exactly 1 newline at the ends of files
  • ensure that YAML files are parsable
  • prevent commits containing files larger than 500 KB
• a fairly detailed .gitignore file to try to avoid file that shouldn't be tracked finding their way into the repo
• added UBC EOAS favicon for browser tabs and bookmarks
• GitHub Actions workflow: .github/workflows/sphinx-to-gh-pages.yaml
  • build Sphinx website and publish its html, etc. to gh-pages branch so that it is updated at https://douglatornell.github.io/numeric-refactor/ whenever commits are pushed to the main branch
• refactor an example (Lab 1) of a notebook and supporting scripts, images, etc. from jupytext-based workflow and multiple directories into website/ tree

Questions

• License?

  Susan says:

  Given that it is mostly text in the notebooks, lets go creative commons. I'm using: Worksheets for Numeric Course by Susan Allen, Rachel White, Phil Austin and The University of British Columbia are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to add yourself or refer to a contributors list.

  I suggest Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, the updated version of 3.0 Unported

• Copyright notices in files?

  Susan says:

  Yes please, but I'll reach out to Phil to double check.

• Project information in website config? presently:

  project = "Numeric course"                  Fine
  copyright = "Numeric project"               Change to contributors and add a contributors page?
  author = "Numeric Project"                  Fine
  version = ""                                202201
  release = "0.1"                             what do you suggest?

  I suggest:

  version = "22.1"
  release = version

  Version follows the YY.N pattern we use for SalishSeaCast packages that is somewhat in line with https://calver.org/ without getting hung up on the month in the version; N is just a sequential number that gets incremented when the accumulated changes are deemed to be "significant". I don't really expect there to be a 22.2 version of the course. Next will likely be 24.1.

• Add list updated date to website page footer?

  Susan says:

  Yes.

• Stay with the readthedocs theme? Gallery of some alternatives at https://sphinx-themes.org/ Susan says:

  Switch the theme so its clear we are on a new site. I like Sandstone.

• Is numlabs.show_figure important? It's not mentioned anywhere in narrative pages or notebooks

  Susan says:

  Probably cruft.

Notes

• I use Mambaforge (specifically Mambaforge-pypy3) as my conda environment/package manager
• <div> tags around display math in notebooks prevent math rendering in VSCode but not jupyter lab or jupyter notebook. Removing them fixes rendering in VSCode and doesn't affect lab or notebook rendering.
• There are a bunch of other displaymath rendering issues when the notebooks are viewed in VSCode. At least some are due to displaymath having text before or after it on the same line; easily resolved by adding newlines, but tedious...

• Sphinx warns of various markup issues in lab1:

  reading sources... [100%] notebooks/lab1/01-lab1
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:819: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Example Four
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:829: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Example Five
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:954: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Demo: Interpolation
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1086: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Interpolation Quiz
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1221: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Discretization Quiz
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1278: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Summary
  ^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1329: WARNING: Title level inconsistent:
  
  Example Six
  ^^^^^^^^^^^
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1972: WARNING: Unexpected indentation.
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1969: WARNING: Inline interpreted text or phrase reference start-string without end-string.
  /media/doug/warehouse/EOAS-teaching/numeric-refactor/website/notebooks/lab1/01-lab1.ipynb:1973: WARNING: Block quote ends without a blank line; unexpected unindent.