DeployStudio diffing

deploystudio_diff_paths.md

What paths within the DeployStudio components would be useful to keep track of changes in?

DeployStudio's mpkg is a bundle-style distribution package that contains several packages. All the various shell scripts and configuration files seem to exist within the DeployStudio Admin app bundle at:

DeployStudioServer_vX.Y.Z.mpkg/Contents/Packages/deploystudioAdmin.pkg

Here are several useful top-level paths that could be useful to track:

DeployStudio Admin.app/Contents/Applications/DeployStudio Assistant.app

Contains the sys_builder script and its components used to build NBIs. Frequently updated for fix NBI-related issues.

DeployStudio Admin.app/Contents/Plugins

Source of scripts used for all DeployStudio workflow tasks.

DeployStudio Admin.app/Contents/Frameworks/DSCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources

Some other core components shared between Admin and Runtime.

Without any kind of file type filtering these will include things like image resources, etc. but these are unlikely to change frequently and so will not clutter up diffs too significantly. We'd be sure that we wouldn't accidentally filter out files that would be useful to see changes (or new files created), and while it's certain this would also include binary files, these could be also be useful to have at hand for comparison.

Are there any other paths we should track?

God forbid they should put release notes somewhere in a form that's easily parseable, like a text file.

I just updated it to track the entire DeployStudio Admin.app - this adds a few more changes per version, but relative to all other changes it's mostly only a few more. I'd guess that other core frameworks besides DSCore change much less frequency.

https://github.com/timsutton/DeployStudioDiffs/releases

So even scraping the release notes is not going to be pretty... not every release note page follows the same style; e.g. "What's New" is sometimes "style_2" and sometimes "style_3". Short of doing full blown regex on the whole page, there isn't going to be an easy way to automate gathering the release notes.

Inconsistent styles are probably thanks to the fact that they're still using iWeb to generate these pages:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="Generator" content="iWeb 3.0.4" />
<meta name="iWeb-Build" content="local-build-20140309" />