persimmon_boykin_spaniel
This release brings first-class support for Readmes, adds a bunch of stability, and sets the table for exciting collaboration features in the future.
📄 Qri now supports readme!
This release brings support for a new dataset component, readmes! Following in a long tradition of readme's in the world of software. Readme's are markdown documents for explaining your dataset in human terms.
The easiest way to create a readme is by creating a file called readme.md in an FSI-linked directory. Qri will pick up on the file & add it to your dataset. You can see what the rendered HTML version looks like by running qri render in an FSI-linked directory.
In the future, we're excited to build out the feature set readme's offer, and think they're a better long-term fit for us than the generic notion of our existing viz component. Readme's differ from viz by not allowing generic script inclusion, which allows us to present them in a safer sandbox-like environment. This fits well with our story around transform scripts and the general expectation that scripts Qri interacts with will come with a safer execution properties.
With this release, support for readme's in qri.cloud and desktop is right around the corner.
Happy note taking!
📘 Introducing Logbook
Until now qri has used stored datasets as it's source of history. Qri keeps commit information in the dataset itself, and creates a log of datasets by having each dataset reference the one before it. Keeping commits in history has a number of advantages:
- all datasets are attributed to the user that made them
- all datasets have an accurate creation timestamp
- all datasets include any notes the author made at the time
- all of these these details are part of the dataset, and move with it.
We've gone a long way with this simplistic apporoach, but using datasets as the only source of history has one major limitation: the history of a dataset is tied to the data itself. This means you can't uncover the full history of a dataset unless you have all versions of a dataset stored locally. Logbook fixes that problem.
Logbook is a coordination tool for talking about who did what, without having to move around the data itself. This means Qri can tell you meaningful things about dataset versions you don't have. This will make syncing faster, and forms the basis for collaboration.
To make use of logbook, all you have to do is... nothing! Logbook is a transparent service that overlays onto traditional Qri commands. You'll see some new details in commands like qri log and a few new plumbing commands like qri fetch and qri logbook, but this feature adds no new requirements to the Qri workflow.
We're most excited about what logbook allows us to do (collaboration!), and can't wait to ship features that will show the benefit of logbook. More fun soon!
🏗 Stability Improvements
As always, we're working on stabilizing & improving the way Qri works. We've this release we've focused on bringing stability to three major areas
- filesystem integration (FSI)
- remotes
- diff
Note: Turns out this commit a60187f changed 0.9.1-alpha into 0.9.2-dev. Presumably we were using 0.9.1-alpha because we were intending on cutting 0.9.1 a few weeks ago, but that never happened, then this commit mistakingly skipped it. So we're doing this release as 0.9.1.