Clean up topics vs practices in config.json

[dmaahs2017]

Addresses #1407. I think this also has something to do with #1089. Though I'm not entirely sure.

I also created a python script to automate this task.

[coriolinus]

Thank you, this is useful work! While I'd slightly prefer it if the script were written in Rust, I do understand the desire for a shorter script for a utility item like this, and it will be fine that it's currently in Python.

[dmaahs2017]

Thank you, this is useful work! While I'd slightly prefer it if the script were written in Rust, I do understand the desire for a shorter script for a utility item like this, and it will be fine that it's currently in Python.

I do love Rust; it just seemed a bit overkill for this use-case. And thank you for the suggestions! 😃

[dmaahs2017]

@coriolinus Is this an important issue? If so, how would you like it to be resolved? Is this logic I should add to the script?

[coriolinus]

@coriolinus Is this an important issue?

Not sure, I haven't seen it before. I asked the other maintainers. I'll let you know when I hear back.

[coriolinus]

The response seems to be that:

• there isn't yet any documentation I can link to about the restriction, unfortunately
• but it's a real limitation we can't bypass. It breaks the website's styling if any concept has more than 10 "practices" exercises

To me this sounds like we need a post-processing step. I think it's safe to assume that entries in config.json are sorted in approximate order of difficulty / relevance, so we just need something like

for concept in concepts:
    count = 0
    for practice_exercise in config['exercises']['practice']:
        if concept in practice_exercise['practices']:
            count += 1
        if count > 10:
            practice_exercise['practices'].remove(concept)

[dmaahs2017]

Thanks for looking into that. I've worked that logic into the script and re-ran it.

[coriolinus]

Just two more edits, sorry.

• If we remove a topic from the practices array due to count, we should put it back into the topics array. That ensures we don't destroy information. I should have thought of that earlier.
• Both the practices and topics arrays should be sorted for each exercise after all other modifications are complete. The linter will complain otherwise.

[dmaahs2017]

Sounds good, added that logic as well

[coriolinus]

Thanks for doing this work!

[dmaahs2017]

Glad I could help! 😃