2.3.3 The sync Target

The sync target has a simple task: synchronize the original English articles from a canonical repository, like ‘www’. It is very important that such synchronization happens, because it is desirable to develop the software and add more features in a testbed, while the ‘official instance’ operates on the official repository in a predictable way.

It is recommended that you ‘build’ the sync target from a cron job, some time before the general build occurs. That way, prerequisites (e.g. original .html articles) will be updated from the canonical repository and the subsequent make invocation, possibly run by cron as well, will update all translations.

The VCS variable affects the behavior: if it is defined to ‘yes’ then the synchronized files are committed to the ‘testing’ repository, i.e. the destination. In addition, if a file meant to be synchronized disappeared from the source, a warning mail will be sent to the address defined in the devel-addr variable (defined in gnun.conf). The build will continue without failure, and will sync and commit all other files, but will send the same email message again if the file is still present in the files-to-sync variable during a subsequent invocation.

In addition, sync synchronizes all “verbatim” server templates that are not under GNUN’s control, such as server/header.html, server/banner.html, server/footer.html and their translations, as defined in the verbatim-templates variable. This is important, as these files may change in the master repository, while the validation of the HTML files in the development repository will be performed with the old templates expanded, thus making this specific test more or less bogus.

VCS=always has no effect on this target, as well as VALIDATE.