Problematic practice exercises

[colinleach]

While adding test templates as described in #465, we keep finding some very old exercises that are wildly unlike the canonical version.

So far:

• Allergies ✅
• Crypto Square
• Triangle ✅
• Tournament

No doubt there will be others. We're not talking minor variations. For example, Crypto Square requires implementation of 4 functions, not the canonical single function.

I don't want anyone wasting time trying to beat these into submission. Maybe we can add some extra tests manually, but I don't even see what tests.toml is doing in these cases, and we'll never automate them.

Should we mark them in some way, such as adding an empty .meta/.notemplate file?

No big worry. If we can template at least half the 85 active exercises and all the new ones going forward, I call that a win.

[BethanyG]

No big worry. If we can template at least half the 85 active exercises and all the new ones going forward, I call that a win.

That was the strategy we used for Python. Then we put out a call for folx to chip away at the remainder. We still have about 5-8 that we haven't templated. But that's out of 125/130 - so I am very happy with that. Anything new, we require a template. Concept exercises are exempt.

[depial]

Update on the bomb squad:

I think I've gotten allergies to conform, and now that my tail's up, I may be able to wrangle triangle into place since it has similar problems to allergies (e.g. testing with classes), but no promises there...

crypto-square is so different, that we may want to deprecate it and republish. I had a look at the original PR #75 and it looks like there was some hesitation to publish it with the extra functions since they could cause some confusion, and it was left open for future revision by others.

tournament is structured to conform to canonical-data, but the problem is translating the expected canonical-data into a data.frame. This would likely need a macro or something to do quite a bit of string manipulation, and I'm not yet agile enough to do that.