[Haskell-cafe] ANN: darcswatch, a way to track your contributions

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi Haskellers,

today I scrached an itch that was icking for a while: When I submit
patches to some project or person, I’m never sure that I won’t forget
checking that the patch will actually be applied. But if I forget, and
the maitainer forgets (or decides against), my patch would be lost.

Therefore I wrote a little haskell program darcswatch, which has a bunch
of patches to track, and a bunch of repositories to watch, and shows you
what patches have to be applied where. You see it in action here:

                       http://darcswatch.nomeata.de/

To use it conveniently, I have put this in my ~/.darcs/defaults:

	send sign
	send cc darcswatch at nomeata.de

so all patches I send will be signed and copied to that address. For
security reasons, only mails signed by allowed gpg keys are accepted and
the webpage is updated. It is also updated every hour by a cronjob.

As you can see the program is ready to track patches by several authors.
If you want to try it out and help debug it, just drop me a (signed)
note with your gpg key-id, also listing all repositories you want to be
tracked.

I would also appreciate any help with programming darcswatch. There is a
darcs repository on http://darcs.nomeata.de/darcswatch/ (with DarcsWeb
at http://darcs.nomeata.de/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=darcswatch;a=summary).

There is a lot to do yet, I quote the TODO list on
http://darcs.nomeata.de/darcswatch/README :

  * Support for tagged repositories (fetching older inventories)
  * Cache the inventories and only update when needed, by issuing a HEAD request.
  * Add a download link to each pach
  * Add the diff to each patch, with some javascript hiding/unhiding.
  * Cabalize the program.
      * Detect inverted patches and treat specially (e.g. an unapplied
        patch where the user also submitted an inverted patch can be
        considered obsolete)
  * Nicer output (CSS magic!)
  * (Maybe) Add repositores per gpg signed command

Haskell projects could also make use of darcswatch by tracking patches
that were submitted to a bugtracker (e.g. for xmonad) or via the mailing
list, to make sure no contribution is lost. I could also imagine that it
might be a service that, if proven reliable, could be run on
community.haskell.org or similar. 

As always, comments are appreciated.

Enjoy,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
  mail: mail at joachim-breitner.de | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Key: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org
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