Create a mechanism for making it clear what people need to change/update when they use this template

[jordansread]

Option 1: Use automatic issue creation with github actions.

• Downsides: triggering the issue creation requires an additional effort beyond creating the repo w/ the template, you need to star it or do some other event we can key off of. Additionally, we don't yet know how to template the issues so they can link to specific files in the repo (since each repo will have a different URL than the parent template). We were able to do this kind of thing with repo and username variables in the training modules, but aren't sure how to do that outside of labs

Option 2: Use a pull request GH action or a travis CI to run a simple checker script that looks that the template defaults have been changed in the two appropriate yamls: the remake.yml and the in_txt/text_data_release.yml. Don't give a ✅ on any pull requests until these simple tests pass.

• Downsides: don't know how clear these test fails will be - will it be easy to see which of these fields you didn't change or will you just get an ❌ and have to dig into logs? Or can we have the PR kick off several isolated checkers, with each one able to comment pass/fail on the PR in some kind of verbose way? unknown.

[lindsayplatt]

Oh wow - option 2 would be really cool! If all of the information we want to convey can just be summed into a pass/fail for needed changes to the repo, then that would be great. Only issue I see is that we will need to still put instructions somewhere so that people know what needs to get done.

I think we can be able to figure out how to get the issues to link to the current repo URL. Just would need to spend a bit of time researching how to do that. It wasn't high priority for me before, so I really didn't look into it. I don't think there would be a way around needing to star the repo, but we can always put that as an instruction in the initial README and then edit the README during that setup action so that it is ready for the actual template. I don't see needing to star the repo as that different from knowing that you need to use this template, especially if we say to do that in the instructions.

I don't really know what actions people must do when using this repo, so it is hard to say if issues or automated PR checks would be best.