REPO / All courses: duplicate content accross courses

[eemilhaa]

Issue

There's unnecessary duplication accross the course materials. For example, QGIS basics such as connecting to a WMS are covered very similarly in multiple courses.

When a duplicated exercise is updated, ideally the changes should be reflected in all the places that use said exercise. Currently this is manual and prone to be forgotten: It requires the maintainer to 1. know that the material is duplicated, 2. know all of the places where it is duplicated.

Solutions

To fix this, we'd need to include either files or the rmarkdown contents of files accross different courses.

• The file approach could be done by symlinking the duplicated exercise .Rmd file wherever it is needed. This is probably not enough: for example, exercise numbering gets messed up if the exercise is a different number accross courses.

• We can also include rmarkdown directly between files. This would overcome the numbering issue, as we can include only the exercise content. For example:

# Harjoitus 2

whatever is specific to the exercise in this course

Include the rest of the content from here:

```{r, child='./path/to/shared_exercise.Rmd'}

Having quickly tested this, including contents from other rmarkdown files this way seems to work with our course material setup (render.sh).

[eemilhaa]

@JuhoErvasti some non-urgent thoughts about the duplication issue

[JuhoErvasti]

@eemilhaa Using R code chunks sounds like a very good approach. Seems like it would be pretty easy to implement? Although one thing I'm wondering is the images, I think the links would break if you use relative paths in the included Rmd documents. But I'm sure that can be solved. Or did you already test this with images?

Also I wonder if other things which could be modularized like this, for example each course has a "reading guide" explaining the different code boxes etc. which are also probably still not fully uniform and a pain to update.

[eemilhaa]

@JuhoErvasti Images with relative paths do seem to come over when including content. And yes, there definitely would be quite a few cases where this could be helpful I assume!

One thing that could become more complex with this is detecting changes in courses for the deployment workflow (i.e. updating shared content should ideally result in rendering all courses that depend on said content).

When I have time I (or anyone) could throw together a demo-pr to test this a bit more.

[JuhoErvasti]

@eemilhaa Okay, sounds good.