Imagine you have a git repository that contains several .typ, .tex or .md files or whatever you use to generate Portable Document Files. Once the .pdf leaves your repository, they will get printed out, sent via Mail and uploaded to whoknowswhere.
How to identify the documents, find out who reviewed and approved them and prevent use of obsolete documents?
We are developers first and foremost and don't want to deal with any badly designed UIs for document management, we want to use the tools we are familiar with: git, GitHub and the command line.
This tool solves just that problem. It is a thin wrapper around git that gives you the last commit which changed a file (or one of its dependencies) you are interested in. The dependencies are defined in a simple .toml file.
We use it to automatically insert the git commit hash into our documents when building them and before using them internally or sending them to customers. We open a PR for changes and use GitHub for the review and approval process.
Let's say we have a file called manual.typ, which includes several images and is used to build manual.pdf. If the file itself or one of the images is changed, we want to update the commit hash in manual.pdf. We do not want to update the commit hash if it's not needed, since we might track changes to manual.pdf itself in the repository and don't want our repo size to explode.
If there are uncommited changes, a DIRTY flag is appended to the commit hash in the document, marking this file as unfit for usage, since it might depend on uncommited changes.
change-monitor <filename> [--date]
The --date flag gives you the date of the latest commit instead of the hash, so you know the date the file was last changed.
The commit hash or date, respectively, are written to stdout, everything else (loggingm, errors) goes to stderr.
The tool looks for a file called .deps.toml located at the basedirectory of your <filename>.
$ change-monitor example.typ
INFO [change_monitor] Monitor changes for file: "/Users/bob/docs/example-folder/example.typ"
5d6256345067a82563106c868f2ad1b384286dceor to get the date:
$ change-monitor example.typ --date
INFO [change_monitor] Monitor changes for file: "/Users/bob/docs/example-folder/example.typ"
2024-07-26List dependencies for each versioned file
["file1.typ"]
dependencies = ["dep1.typ", "dep2.typ"]
["file2.txt"]
dependencies = [] # no dependencies, except for the file itself
["file2.tex"]
dependencies = ["*.png", ":!subfolder"]
# file4.txt dependencies is not defined, so the whole basedirectory is taken as a dependencyWe pass the entries to git directly, so you can use git pathspecs to exclude files or to use wildcards.
git clone https://github.com/Systemscape/change-monitorJust type just to get a list of all available commands and some usage instructions, output similar to:
Available just recipes:
• default # list available recipes
• install # Alias for cargo install --path
• i # alias for `install`just installor using the alias
just ior if you don't have just installed
cargo install --path <path/to/repo>cargo install --git https://github.com/Systemscape/change-monitor --locked