Missalettes for Masses at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Gateshead

This repository holds source code to generate missalettes for Masses at St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Gateshead. Masses are generated with a copier template, such as MassTemplate.

Getting pdfs

See here for a list of releases. Otherwise pdfs should built automatically and deployed to the latest release.

Adding a mass

Clone/fork this repository, make an appropriate directory, and use copier, e.g.:

cd /path/to/repo
copier copy gh:St-Josephs-Gateshead/MassTemplate.git new-mass

Then edit propers.tex and add the required .gabc files, e.g. from gregobase.

Later on you may wish to pull in updates from the template. Assuming you have committed your changes, run copier update from within the directory. It is best to overwrite everything, and then use git diff / magit / your favourite git frontend to see what changes to discard and what to keep.

Building locally

The templates will drop a Makefile into the directory. If you wish to build everything locally, like the ci does, have a look at scripts/configure.py. (This relies on github actions variables, so it won't currently run locally, but it's trivial to hard code the url to fetch the latest release.)

Fast CI

Building gregoriotex documents takes for ever. Most pushes only update one or two Masses, but as the repository grows we grind to a halt trying to rebuild everything.

The solution is to rely on document versioning to see when we need to update a pdf. Since we upload a snapshot of the sourcecode when we make a release, we can compare the version number at the time of last release with the version number now. If they are unchanged and a pdf exists in the release, we pull in the pdf and move on; otherwise we mark the directory as needing rebuilding. Lastly we generate a makefile for all directories in need of work.

Although this is recursive make, it's actually fine in this case: make just calls latexmk, and the number of jobs is roughly equivalent to the number of directories, so the only loss we have is not building the pew sheet in parallel with the booklet, which is generally trivial.

Note that we deliberately rely on version numbers rather than diffs. If you do not bump the version number, no release will happen. This forces changed pdfs to have different version numbers.