Automating publication of Git Rev News

[chriscool]

It is a bit tedious to publish an edition of Git Rev news and some parts of the process could easily be automated as @dscho and perhaps others already suggested. Parts that are not automated could be documented.

[chriscool]

Here is the process that I used to publish edition 45:

# If needed make sure we are up-to-date

git checkout master
git pull origin master

# Publish current draft

git mv rev_news/drafts/edition-45.md _posts/2018-11-21-edition-45.markdown

git commit -m "Publish rn-45 in _posts/"

# Create a draft for next edition

git cherry-pick a8d5060 # Cherry pick commit with the last draft  

git mv rev_news/drafts/edition-45.md rev_news/drafts/edition-46.md

perl -pi -e 's/Edition 45/Edition 46/g' rev_news/drafts/edition-46.md

perl -pi -e 's/45th edition/46th edition/g' rev_news/drafts/edition-46.md

perl -pi -e 's/2018-11-21/2018-12-19/g' rev_news/drafts/edition-46.md

perl -pi -e 's/October 2018/November 2018/g' rev_news/drafts/edition-46.md

git commit --amend -m "Add draft for rn-46" rev_news/drafts/edition-46.md

# Push everything to actually publish

git push origin master

# Manually create an issue in GitHub for the draft of the next edition
...

# Manually check that the newly published edition appears on
# https://git.github.io/
...

# Manually announce the newly published edition on the Git mailing list
...

[chriscool]

There is now https://github.com/chriscool/getreleases/blob/master/publish_edition.sh made from the above.

[dscho]

There is now https://github.com/chriscool/getreleases/blob/master/publish_edition.sh made from the above.

Thanks.

I have a couple of suggestions how to improve it, such as:

• verifying that it runs in the correct worktree by looking for a known commit,
• determining the values of cur, next and the likes automatically, even determining the next publication date automatically,
• making the substitution more robust by using a dedicated template rather than cherry-picking the latest (which you cannot change even if you realize that you could improve it right after pushing), and
• coalescing the many perl invocations into a single one.

[chriscool]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Yeah, my plan is to improve it a little every time I will use it to publish a new edition.

[chriscool]

More automation in chriscool/getreleases@66cec42

[chriscool]

Further improvements in:

• chriscool/getreleases@9d286fb
• chriscool/getreleases@18c82e4
• chriscool/getreleases@cfd51be

[chriscool]

@dscho with the following improvements:

• chriscool/getreleases@d4dd351
• chriscool/getreleases@29191ec

I think all your suggestions have been implemented and we can close this issue.