Tag practice exercises with practices and prerequisites

[pablo-miralles]

Summary

• Fills practices and prerequisites for all 108 active practice exercises in config.json (deprecated ones stay empty).
• No new exercises — only tagging.
• Follows configlet constraints:
  • each concept appears in practices at most 10 times
  • prerequisites only use concepts already taught by a concept exercise
  • hello-world keeps empty prerequisites

Approach

• practices: one primary concept per exercise, distributed so common skills (strings, arrays, loops, class-basics, …) stay ≤10.
• prerequisites: unlock using currently taught concepts (basic-syntax, strings, integers, arrays, class-basics, …).
• Untaught concepts (e.g. foreach-loops, match-expression) can still appear in practices; they will unlock more naturally once their concept exercises land.

Gaps after tagging (0 practice links)

These concepts still have no practice exercise tagged (need future exercises and/or concept exercises first):
class-visibility, constructor-promotion, covariance-and-contravariance, readonly-properties, scope-resolution-operator, type-juggling, union-types, variable-functions, variable-length-arguments, variable-scope

Note: type-juggling and variable-length-arguments are taught by concept exercises, but were not used as primary practices tags to stay under the per-concept cap / avoid stretch mappings.

Test plan

• Custom validation: all active tagged, max-10 respected, prereqs ⊆ taught concepts
• bin/configlet lint
• Maintainer review of stretch tags (e.g. break-continue-keywords on killer-sudoku-helper, match-expression on say / yacht / robot-simulator)

Made with Cursor

[mk-mxp]

@pablo-miralles Thank you for wanting to help! I'm sorry, this is actually wasted effort here: The issue #324 you worked on is labelled "paused" for a reason. Prerequisites hide exercises from students, until they have solved a concept exercise. We decided to wait with this, until we have enough exercises:

It should be at least 20 concept exercises to plan out the prerequisites.

Please come up with a plan for discussion first, especially for this task. A pull request made with assumptions you have never discussed is like to cause a lot of frustration on both of our sides.

Thanks again for offering your help!

[pablo-miralles]

@mk-mxp Thank you for the clear explanation, and sorry for the wasted review time :')

This was my first PR ever. I noticed that other tracks in the website lock many practice exercises and unlock them as you learn concepts, so seeing PHP without that surprised me and I jumped straight into this PR. I didn’t notice that #324 was already open. My bad!

Just to make sure I understand the workflow going forward: I should start from the issues (find a related one, or open a new issue referencing existing discussion), get agreement on a plan there, and only then open a PR. Is that correct?

I’d like to help with concept exercises next, until we have enough to start tagging. I already opened #1035. Should I check #578, ask which exercises are needed there, and only then work on a PR linked to that issue?

Thanks again for your time, really appreciated!