[tei-council] Today's little puzzle

[Martin Holmes]

Hi there,

I'm working on this bug:

<https://sourceforge.net/p/tei/bugs/512/>

which requires me to generate via XSLT a little table of statistics 
about macros. I've got the XSLT working fine, and I had imagined this 
situation:

1. The ST chapter has an XInclude pointing to a little fragment file 
containing the stats.

2. When the Guidelines are built, that fragment file is created by XSLT 
based run against p5.xml or p5subset.xml.

However, there's a slight dilemma:

  - If the fragment file does not exist in the svn repo, then the ST 
chapter will be invalid because it will be XIncluding something that 
does not exist.

  - If the fragment file is in svn, then the build process will replace 
it with a newer version; then, since Jenkins does not commit that new 
version back to the repo, the next svn update Jenkins does will error 
out on a conflict, because a newer version of the file exists locally.

Any ideas on how to solve this? One possibility is that the build 
process simply deletes that file at the end, so that the next svn update 
will replace it with the old version. However, that would mean that 
Jenkins would experience changes with every svn update it does (every 
five minutes), and that would trigger a build cycle continuously.

Another option is to copy the original svn version of the file somewhere 
temporarily, replace it during the build process, then copy it over the 
newly-generated version again at the end. That would probably fool svn. 
But maybe there's a simpler solution?

Cheers,
Martin
-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)