Cautionary Notes About Editing the Sponsors Data

Cautionary Notes About Editing the Sponsors Data

IncludeSponsorsDataEditingCaution

In general you should avoid making easy-to-make mistakes.

Nearly all files found in the directory

   /software/accounts-master/data/sponsors/

and all directories beneath it, will be processed by the sponsor_resources command. Exceptions are files whose name begins with . (dot/period) and files in sub-directories which sub-directories are named RCS. If a subdirectory name begins with . (dot/period) then everything beneath it will be ignored (unless referred to explicitly by other files).

The upshot of that is that you cannot place arbitrary files in these directories, or sponsor_resources will stop working correctly.

When editing the sponsors data files, it can often be convenient to copy and modify previously existing lines to create your new additions. If you do that, make sure you correctly change all relevant SponsorshipEnds dates, or remove them as appropriate. Also make sure you delete or change any comments which are irrelevant in the new context. It's better to leave no comments than leave confusing comments.

Consider that the files are intended to help later readers understand the sponsorship situation; use a few comment lines ("#"), and, in general, put a blank line before each ==== line.

Note that id numbers need to be associated with userids. This can be done directly in the AssignTo line as in

      AssignTo: sgamgee:02020202

Or it can be done in the Userids: section at the top of the file. Only one specific id number can be used for a particular userid. See IncludeSponsorsDataIdNumbers for details.

To help make sure we don't slip up and put a real userid:studentid in one of these pages, we by convention omit :studentid in all examples.

Finally, make sure you remember to use the ci -u command so you leave the file editable by others.

-- AdrianPepper - 20 Jan 2015

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This topic IncludeSponsorsDataEditingCaution is referred to by...

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