Adds automatic validation of your citation metadata

[jspaaks]

Hello!

We noticed that your repository is using the Citation File Format to store citation metadata in CITATION.cff. This Pull Request automates validation of that file using the cffconvert GitHub Action. That way, it's a little bit easier to be robust against future changes to the CITATION.cff file.

BTW it's perfectly fine if you don't feel like accepting this Pull Request for whatever reason -- we just thought it might be helpful is all.

We found your repository using a partially automated workflow; if you have any questions about that, feel free to create an issue over at https://github.com/cffbots/filtering/issues/

On behalf of the cffbots team,
@abelsiqueira / @fdiblen / @jspaaks

What does this PR do?

1. Please include a summary of the change and which issue is fixed.
   • there's no existing issue that was discussed
2. Please also include relevant motivation and context.
   • see above
3. List any dependencies that are required for this change.
   • none
4. If we didn't discuss your PR in Github issues there's a high chance it will not be merged.
   • not a problem, I understand that merging PRs is easier if they follow procedure, which this one doesn't

Fixes issue number: N/A

Related PRs:

• Add CITATION.cff #9139
• Fix name order in CITATION.cff #9423

Does your PR introduce any breaking changes? If yes, please list them.

None

Before submitting

• Was this discussed/approved via a GitHub issue? (not for typos and docs) no
• Did you read the contributor guideline, Pull Request section?
• Did you make sure your PR does only one thing, instead of bundling different changes together?
• Did you make sure to update the documentation with your changes? (if necessary) not necessary
• Did you write any new necessary tests? (not for typos and docs) not necessary
• Did you verify new and existing tests pass locally with your changes? This PR doesn't affect the tests
• Did you list all the breaking changes introduced by this pull request? yes there are none
• Did you update the CHANGELOG? (not for typos, docs, test updates, or internal minor changes/refactorings) not necessary

PR review

Anyone in the community is welcome to review the PR.
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Make sure you had fun coding 🙃

[carmocca]

Hi @jspaaks! I have a few questions:

• Is this GitHub action maintained/approved/endorsed by GitHub?
• Is it expected that there will be big changes to the cff format?

I'm generally leaning towards not merging this check, as I don't expect the existing file to ever change. And for any updates, we can quickly refer to the website for documentation.

It's quite cool that you wrote a bot to validate it, but I just don't think it's worth the extra job in our CI, even if it runs only when the file is modified.

[jspaaks]

Hi @carmocca:

of course, if you don't feel like this is something that benefits your project, feel free to close the PR without merging. No hard feelings :)

As to your questions:

1. The cffconvert github action is not maintained/approved/endorsed by GitHub
2. Will there be big changes to the CFF format? Difficult to say--In general, we're trying to take it easy with any big changes, because that makes it difficult for tool developers to keep up. But in any case such updates should not require you to update your CITATION.cff anyway, since that is itself versioned (through the cff-version key).

Maybe something to be aware of for making releases on Zenodo via the GitHub-Zenodo integration (Not sure if you're using that at this time): while ingesting your release, Zenodo reads some metadata from CITATION.cff, notably the authors list, title, license, keywords, abstract, message, and date-released (but not the version it seems). So with the CITATION.cff as it is, your next release will show up like

(This is a release of cffbots' fork of master on Zenodo Sandbox, will be wiped automatically by Zenodo; see here https://sandbox.zenodo.org/record/1009902 for the actual record).

Thanks for your time reviewing this PR. Best regards,
Jurriaan

[carmocca]

Thank you! Now we know where to look if we find a need for this in the future.