If you’re creating a new technote (a DMTN, SQR, or SMTN) document, please follow the steps at https://developer.lsst.io/project-docs/technotes.html#create-a-restructuredtext-technote This is the “old” method of creating a technote by manually invoking cookiecutter.
Previously, we recommended that you use a Slack command, sqrbot project create, to create a technote. We’ve seen an increasing error rate with that service, and at this point we can’t recommend it until our service is re-tooled.
Once the updated SQuaRE Bot command is available, we’ll let you know.
Background
The issue we’re seeing is that Travis CI, which is generally excellent by the way, can take increasingly long amounts of time to recognize new GitHub repos. Sending API calls to refresh Travis CI’s records of our GitHub organizations doesn’t help either.
We think that the best way to accommodate this reality is to make GitHub repo creation and Travis CI activation separate queued tasks. With this change, SQuaRE Bot would create the GitHub repository nearly immediately, and then send a GitHub Pull Request with encrypted credentials for the travis.yml file at a later time (possibly several hours later).
Another thing on our radar is that reStructuredText technote creation is a fairly infrequent event (happening just two or three times a month, on average). This infrequency also makes it hard to justify engineering time to fix this service’s issues. We can grow a bigger user base for the @sqrbot project create service by integrating it with the lsst/templates project. By generalizing @sqrbot project create to leverage our centralized templates, we can also cater to LaTeX technote authors, those creating LDM and DMTR reports, and more.
Thanks for your patience with the @sqrbot project create issues. We’ll get the immediate issue fixed, and make the service more useful for Data Management as a whole.