This repository contains the starter for project one (proposal template) in Computer Science 600 Fall 2019. The main directory of this repository contains the LaTeX source code for a project that is designed for use with GitHub Classroom. To learn more about the course in which these assignments were completed, please visit the Computer Science Thesis Fall 2019 Allegheny College GitHub Organization.
The LaTeX file in this repository is automatically compiled with Travis
CI, thus ensuring that it compiles correctly and,
moreover, that a PDF of the project proposal is available in your GitHub
repository whenever a commit is tagged for a release. Additionally, you can use
a LaTeX compilation command like pdflatex or latexmk to compile the provided
LaTeX file on your local workstation.
This assignment requires a researcher to write a LaTeX document, stored in the
file senior_thesis_proposal.tex that proposes all of the key aspects of a
senior thesis research project. Please refer to the source code in this file for
an explanation of the components of a senior thesis proposal and the way in
which you create them in LaTeX.
Your course instructor will reduce a researcher's grade for this assignment if the pdf of your completed proposal document has not been properly released before the assignment's due date on October 16, 2019 at 11:59 pm. Unless you provide the course instructors with documentation of the extenuating circumstances that you are facing, no late work will be considered towards your grade for this project.
If you have not done so already, please read all of the relevant GitHub Guides that explain how to use many of the features that GitHub provides.
This assignment uses Travis CI to automatically run
the checking programs every time you commit to your GitHub repository. The
checking will start as soon as you have accepted the assignment, thus creating
your own private repository, and the course instructor enables Travis for it. If
you are using Travis for the first time, you will need to authorize Travis CI to
access the private repositories that you created on GitHub. You will partially
complete this authorization by following intuitive steps in your web browser.
You will also need to type the command travis login --pro in your terminal
window when you are in the root of your GitHub repository.
In order for Travis to automatically upload a PDF, called
senior_thesis_proposal.pdf, to GitHub when you tag the commit, you need to
created your encrypted access token. To complete this task you must type the
command travis setup releases --com --force in your GitHub repository for this
assignment. Then, when prompted, please type your username and password for
GitHub. When asked to give the filename, you can type
_build/senior_thesis_proposal.pdf. When asked if you want to deploy from a
specific repository, you can respond with the answer of "no". Finally, when
this tool asks if you want to use encryption, please answer with a "yes".
Now, you should have a .travis.yml file with a secure access token for your
GitHub repository for this assignment. Use a text editor to edit this file and
place the following lines of code at the bottom of it. Please note that you must
preserve the spacing in the following code segment when you paste it into your
own .travis.yml file. Now, you should be ready to perform a commit with tags
and see your PDF uploaded to GitHub!
skip_cleanup: true
on:
tags: true
Since this repository primarily contains LaTeX source code, the Travis CI configuration for it will compile the source code and automatically release a PDF of the main file whenever the last commit is associated with a Git Tag. As such, this will cause a PDF file to become available in the listing of the "Releases" listing for this repository. All release numbers for your writing in this repository should adhere to the Semantic Versioning standard that all GitHub projects are asked to adopt.
Please note that the faculty members who read the PDF that is generated from the
LaTeX source code will only do so by downloading the "tagged" release of the
file senior_thesis_proposal.pdf that has a version number greater than
1.0.0. That is, if your commit is tagged with
senior_thesis_proposal-jjumadinova-1.0.0, then the file
senior_thesis_proposal.pdf should be available for download in the
"Releases" tab in your GitHub repository for this project under the name
senior_thesis_proposal-jjumadinova-1.0.0.
Once you have finished making a single small change to the
senior_thesis_proposal.tex, you should commit your file using a git commit command. Now, to create your first tag for this repository you could
type git tag senior_thesis_proposal-jjumadinova-0.1.0. Of course, you should
substitute your user name for jjumadinova when you create the tag. At this point,
you are ready to push your changes with the appropriate tag by typing the
command git push -u origin master --tags. After waiting for a period of time,
you should see that your GitHub repository features a new release of the
document that you must create for this project.
When you make subsequent changes to your files and perform commits and you are
ready to release a new version of senior_thesis_proposal.pdf, then you should
again tag your work — before running a push — with a tag that
adheres to the Semantic Versioning standard. Each time
that you correctly execute this sequence of commands you will release a new
version of your document to GitHub that is easily accessible as a PDF to you and
to your first and second readers. If you are unable to create a tagged release
using the automated system that Travis provides you can manually create one by
using GitHub's web interface; to adopt the manual approach please click the
"Draft a new release" button in the Releases tab of your GitHub repository.
If a course instructor updates the provided material for this assignment and you would like to receive these updates, then you can type this command in the main directory for this assignment:
git remote add download [email protected]:allegheny-computer-science-thesis-2019/cs600f2019_proposal.git
You should only need to type this command once; typing the command additional times may yield an error message but will not negatively influence the state of your repository. Now, you are ready to download the updates provided by the course instructor by typing:
git pull download master
This second command can be run whenever a course instructor needs to provide you with new source code for this assignment. However, please note that, if you have edited the files that the course instructor updated, running the previous command may lead to Git merge conflicts. If this happens, you may need to manually resolve them with the help of the instructor or a teaching assistant.
If you have found a problem with this assignment's provided source code, then you can go to the Computer Science 600 Project 1 Starter repository and create an issue by clicking the "Issues" tab and then clicking the green "New Issue" button. To ensure that your issue is properly resolved, please provide as many details as is possible about the problem that you experienced.
Please note that these assignment sheets have been developed and tested on an
Ubuntu 18.04 workstation running a recent version of LaTeX that was manually
installed using the TeXLive installer. It is also worth noting that you can
compile the senior_thesis_proposal.tex file using LaTeX development tools
such as latexmk or pdflatex. If you are unable to compile this file with
your development tools and your execution environment, then please open a new
issue and we will attempt to resolve your concerns.
Students who find, and use the appropriate GitHub issue tracker to correctly document, a mistake in any aspect of this laboratory assignment will receive free laptop stickers and extra credit towards their grade for it.
If you are having trouble completing any part of this project, then please talk with your first reader. In particular, if you have questions about your research project, please see your first reader. Alternatively, you may ask questions in the Slack team for this course.