🐱bag

A repository of loose helpers, base clases and assorted code that can be trivially referenced individually or by folders, using dotnet-file.

cat:

cat is one of the most frequently used commands on Unix-like operating systems. It has three related functions with regards to text files: displaying them, combining copies of them and creating new ones.

(bag): in spanish, "bolsa de gatos". In Argentina, roughly a "mixed bag" of code, especially when referring to projects like "Helpers" and "Common" which everyone hates but can't quite avoid.

You can efectively "cat" files from this repo straight into yours.

Each piece of functionality that extends the dotnet framework (or any library, actually) in this manner, is hereafter known as a 🐱 (:cat:).

For example, running the following on your repository root:

> dotnet file add https://github.com/devlooped/catbag/blob/main/System/Xml/XmlWrappingReader.cs src/Common/

Will download and add the file to src/Common/System/Xml/XmlWrappingReader.cs (you cat the remote file). If no target directory is specified, the file will be downloaded to the current directory, under System/Xml. If you want to downlodad it without a directory structure at all, to the current directory, you can pass . as the target directory.

Once downloaded, dotnet-file creates (or updates) a dotnet-config file in the current directory named .netconfig as follows:

[file "src/Common/System/Xml/XmlWrappingReader.cs"]
	url = https://github.com/devlooped/catbag/blob/main/System/Xml/XmlWrappingReader.cs
	sha = 19be5e474022ab5b8993b29509a3929439f510e9
	etag = a4dba639f18b47a9e480704abf86b1ba2582c54b76a520d7ed988aa1efcd7b8d

The url is used in combination with the etag to detect changes in the source file afterwards, whenever you run dotnet file update. The sha is used if you pass a -c|--changelog file path to the command, which will contain the diff between the local sha and the latest one at the source. See PR#46 and PR#40 for example.

You can easily automate running these checks for updates in CI on a schedule, to automatically generate those update PRs shown above. See dotnet-file.yml as an example that does this using GitHub Actions.