Today I updated my blog generator for the first time since around 2015. After I missed a couple of releases, I had been afraid to touch it, since you never know how much of a time sink a major upgrade will be. Now that CentOS 7 supports python 3 and python 2 is officially a zombie, I figured I better get things back into a supportable state.
Well, I have good news: The Pelican folks have done an amazing job with backwards compatibility. Other than changing a few paths to point to the new installation, not a single thing broke!
On the topic of backwards compatiblity, I also decided to rename my content
files to include the date. I wrote a quick bash one-liner that extracted the
Date header from each article and renamed the file to include the date
portion at the front of the name. After regenerating the site into a temporary
directory, everything initially looked fine, so I updated the main site.
That was easy, right? Not so fast: I suddenly had a bunch of broken links.
Pelican allows you to cross-link articles by referring to the local file name,
and I had forgotten this when I renamed all the files. Luckily there weren’t
very many, so it was easy to grep for {filename} and fix them all by hand.
The externally visible URL paths hadn’t changed, since I learned that lesson
during the
previous blog upgrade.
There are a couple of possible lessons here:
- Hooray for good backwards compatibility! Pelican made my life a lot easier with such a smooth upgrade.
- Hooray for the power of the shell! I was able to rename all my files with a bash one-liner and fix all the broken links with a couple of grep and vim calls. No real programming needed.
- Hooray for encapsulation! By keeping the public URL paths separate from the local filenames, I don’t have to update any external links after renaming everything.
- This is an instance where a database might have helped. There would be no need to rename files if I could trivially sort database queries by date. Since I can’t put every piece of metadata into the filename, this might apply again in the future. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to move files around (or write a quick perl script) than to redesign a database schema if it turns out not to include an important piece of data.