Nonstandard metadata.yml properties

[rbasso]

A quick survey of x-common/exercises/*/metadata.yml files show that...

• 114 (all of them) have a blurb property.
• 86 have a source property.
• 82 have a source_url property.
• 7 have additional properties not listed above.

These are the 7 files with additional properties:

• counter
• error-handling
• lens-person
• nucleotide-codons
• rectangles
• react
• variable-length-quantity

All the atipical properties appear to be related to:

• exercise classification
• deprecation status

From what I understand, exercise classification became a track-specific
matter. Right?

The counter exercise is the only one that has a deprecated property,
while others - and also counter - have a .deprecated file, as described
in exercism/DEPRECATED.x-api#140:

• count
• nucleotide-codons
• point-mutations

Is there any reason to keep these atipical properties in metadata.yaml?

My impression is that these properties are not serving any useful purpose
right now and should be deleted to avoid confusion, but I don't know if
there is code depending on these keys somewhere.

I'm also asking because, if the only useful properties are...

• blurb
• source
• source_url

... which are data pertaining the exercises - and not their status or
classification - it may be reasonable to consider merging this information
in canonical-data.json.

The resulting file would be mandatory, but the test cases would be optional.
There is a draft of this idea presented here.

[ErikSchierboom]

From what I understand, exercise classification became a track-specific
matter. Right?

That is correct! In There was a discussion first, and the end result was that each track had an issue opened for them. This is the issue for the F# track: exercism/fsharp#197. That means that any mention of topics in the metadata of exercises should be removed (not sure if any depends on them, but it seems unlikely).

The counter exercise is the only one that has a deprecated property,

I think this is an error, as it should indeed be a .deprecated file.

[petertseng]

deprecated property

Oh yeah, that was added in 8d48f55 for #80 long before we had .deprecated files (exercism/DEPRECATED.x-api#140)

I can tell you I find no uses of this property in https://github.com/exercism/trackler/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=deprecated - the deprecated file is what is used.