[shipped] course data is now automatically synced!

[qaisjp]

TL;DR: As of e1ba9bb we now automatically sync course data from course.inf.ed.ac.uk to master/_data/courses.yml!

The what file?

The courses.yaml file is a dump of Informatics' course listing. Better Informatics uses it to organise courses into semesters, suggest relevant courses (third years can take fourth year courses too, as long as they are Level 10), and probably other stuff too.

Explanation

Previously, whenever I noticed the course data was a bit stale, I'd run the courses.yaml generator that lives in bi-app. Then I'd copy the YAML file it generated and paste it over the YAML file in this repo. All of this is manual work.

Now, every weekday at 7pm, that script and this GitHub workflow will automatically commit and push any courses.yaml updates to master, completely on its own!

It won't create extra commits, either. If there are no real changes, it will simply do nothing!

What if it changes mid-week and I want it to update NOW!

That's cool. You can also run it manually. Just follow these instructions:

1. Click the Actions tab
2. Select the Update courses.yaml data workflow
3. Click Run workflow
4. Leave Branch as master, and click Run workflow

The nitty gritty

To make this possible, there were a few changes I had to make to the YAML generator:

• Remove hardcoded academic years.
• Add some diffing code that would print out a special directive that GitHub workflows understand https://github.com/compsoc-edinburgh/bi-app/blob/afcb7a3406f9926f5999ed7b6202d5ce5588329e/courses.yaml/app.py#L171-L177, so that we don't create commits when nothing has actually changed.

You can view the first ever run here: https://github.com/compsoc-edinburgh/betterinformatics/runs/1099186437?check_suite_focus=true

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I'm happy to answer any and all questions!

(I'm leaving this announcement open for a little while, and I will close it later.)