A simple CLI to extract citation information from a CITATION.cff.

This project's license is GPL 2 (as of June 1991). The whole license text can be found in LICENSE in the main directory of this repository. The brief version is as follows:

Copyright (C) 2022 Kevin Matthes

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

When compiling a printable version of this documentation using Pandoc, the full license will be attached automatically to the resulting document. This can be invoked by calling repository-manual.m.

The compilation of such an optional repository manual can be invoked by just calling one of the following lines in a terminal.

octave repository-manual.m
octave-cli repository-manual.m

Both will redirect to the same application, GNU Octave, which will then create the manual for this repository and attach the entire license to it. The resulting file, repository.pdf, will be saved in the main directory of this repository.

A common task when working with CFF is adding another project's citation meta data to the own CITATION.cff's references section. Since these files are often very long -- due to having references to cite on their own or many people who contributed, for instance -- and not sorted uniformly, it might be a challenge to filter out all required lines by hand. Furthermore, there can also be a preferred-citation provided which could be overseen in a quite big citation configuration file.

In order to solve these issues, cffreference provides the capability to appropriately cite another project automatically. Given an input file which is valid according to the Schema Version 1.2.0, cffreference will extract the relevant lines to cite.

Any input file will be cited by its preferred-citation, by default. If this entry should not be specified, the whole file will be processed in order to generate a proper references item. In the latter case, the input file is assumed to specify a software.

By default, the results are written to stdout. This behaviour is intended to be a preview mode in order to verify that the correct repository is going to be cited. The extracted results can be also piped around in terminal sessions such that other CFF tools can be instructed with cffreference's output.

cffreference ./path/to/input/CITATION.cff

In order to append the extracted citation information to a certain, writable CITATION.cff, its path must be given as the second argument to the application which will then add the new reference at the end of the output file.

cffreference ./path/to/input/CITATION.cff ./path/to/output/CITATION.cff

In case no arguments or more than two are given, the application will show the license information as well as a brief information on how to use cffreference correctly.

cffreference