Skip to contents

Auxiliary Data - Version Control

Release branch management

Rossana Tatulli

managing_release_branches.Rmd

The {pipaux} package manages auxiliary data used across PIP. It includes functions like aux_ppp() for PPP data and aux_gdp() for GDP data (formerly pip_*()), which allow users to update or load specific auxiliary data. For example, calling aux_gdp() will update or load GDP data depending on user specification. When updating data, these functions push the changes to the DEV branch of the respective auxiliary data repository. The DEV branch of each auxiliary data repository is therefore updated with changes.

To ensure that the version of auxiliary data used for each release is properly tracked, 2 steps are necessary:

  • Each auxiliary data repository should have a dedicated release branch.
  • The release branch must be periodically updated with changes from the DEV branch. To facilitate the management of release branches and synchronization with the DEV branch, the {pipfun} package provides functions designed for this purpose.

Specifically,

1. Check if release branch is there, and if not, create it 

# install.packages("pak")
#pak::pak("PIP-Technical-Team/pipfun@DEV_v2")

library("pipfun")

# Get branches in repo

# Example 1: TEST repo
repo_branches <- pipfun::get_repo_branches(repo  = "aux_test", 
                                           owner = getOption("pipfun.ghowner"))
repo_branches

# Example 2: PPP repo

pipfun::get_repo_branches(repo  = "aux_ppp", 
                          owner = getOption("pipfun.ghowner"))


# As no release branch is found, create it from DEV
# create_new_branch(new_branch = "20241005",
#                   ref_branch = "DEV",
#                   repo = "aux_ppp")

2. Check that release branch is updated with DEV 


pipfun::compare_branch_content(repo    = "aux_test",
                               branch1 = "DEV",
                               branch2 = "main")

3. Update release branch if needed

In this case, given that the release branch has just been created, it is up to date with DEV. However, had “same_content” been FALSE, we need to update release branch accordingly as follows:


# Option 1: Make release branch point to the latest commit as in DEV
# pipfun::update_branches(repo    = "aux_test",
#                         branch1 = "DEV",
#                         branch2 = "20241005")

# Option 2: Merge DEV into release branch

# pipfun::merge_branch_into(repo          = "aux_test",
#                           source_branch = "DEV",
#                           target_branch = "20241005")