Add Files To assignment Template Repo about abc-classroom

[lwasser]

to be clear i'm making use of that great gitignore and create readme function in the scripts. i just want to have them be flexible functions rather than as written where they manually add things within the function.

https://github.com/earthlab/autograding-notebooks/blob/master/scripts/make-template-repo.py#L14

https://github.com/earthlab/autograding-notebooks/blob/master/scripts/make-template-repo.py#L20

those functions above are just not generic enough but they are what we want. i want them to populate from the config file but they can be written generically to grab a list of things and write them to the file!

[kcranston]

Current abc-classroom setup is a single config file for the course. It sounds like we want per-assignment configuration. Do you want to do that within a single config file or have separate config files for each assignment? If the former, it could look something like this (where README.md : student_README.md are the target and source for extra files to be copied to the template):

extra_files:
  README.md: student_README.md

assignment_1:
  extra_files:
     README.md: assignment1_README.md

So any per-assignment settings would override the course-level settings.

[lwasser]

Abc-classroom is setup with a single config for the course, correct.
We still want that. Abc-classroom then has assignment yaml list elements as you have above.

I was thinking that the starting functionality would be focused on just the basic files we want in each repo - not on customizing per assignment (with the exception of the assignment name) for the readme and gitignore. Let's consider doing as follows:

1. readme:
   Abc-classroom creates a default readme for each assignment that has the assignment name in it, etc. if readme is in the extra files, it gets created. If there is a paragraph of text below the readme, abc-classroom adds that to the readme too! The readme will be customized with each assignment name ideally when the assignment directory / repo is created. does that make sense? so we are making a single template that is used over and over but just customized with the assignment name as the # header of the readme.

So the readme for assignment-1 would look like this:

Assignment 1: Course Name Here

optional text here as prescribed below in the yaml under extra_files

extra_files:
  README.md: 
      - text here that might be populated in the default readme file.
  gitignore: 
      - ds_Store
      - some-other-file.py 

assignment_1:
  # I think this could be future functionality. the option to add custom files
  # The challenge with this is we have to decide where the user will put them and i think that is complicated... so i'd rather hold off on this functionality for now and just start with the readme and .gitignore which we know we want for each repo!
  extra_files:
     README.md: assignment1_README.md

does that make sense? so i'm opting for a simple first approach. not customizing in the yaml for each assignment - YET just one yaml for all assignments. then we can add per assignment readme customization in the future if the functions are written generically enough.

IMPORTANT:

If there is no readme or gitignore under extra_files, then i'd like it to NOT create those files.

Future Enhancement Customize readme text for each assignment

TBD....

[lwasser]

this as well. can we close this now @kcranston