RSS feed for recent gridengine source code changes

dag@sonsorol.org (chris) — Fri, 05 May 2006 08:47:16 -0400

Feedback wanted on a new experiment I've been playing around with ...

If you make use of an RSS feed reader or aggregator and are interested enough in Grid Engine to want to keep an eye on codebase activity then please check out this newly created (and still in testing) RSS feed:

http://gridengine.info/feeds/gridengine-codebase-activity.rdf

The feed is generated via the cvs2rss.pl script which in turn, relies on cvs2cl.pl.

By default, cvs2rss.pl is only able to generate HTML links to websites using the ViewCVS CGI front end. However, since the code was so well written it was a trivial exercise for me to write a new CVS2RSS::Formatter::CollabNet perl module that is capable of deep linking into the collabnet-powered gridengine.sunsource.net CVS browsing tools.

The final customization was copied by from great hack done by newly minted Ph.D. and bioperl guru Jason Staijch. The original version of cvs2rss.pl creates HTML links that go directly to the revised file mentioned in the CVS commit log. Jason ended up hacking the cvs2rss Formatter:: code so that the URL (by default) points to a page that renders a "colored diff" comparison between the current file revision and the previous version. This is a great, direct and easy way to directly see *exactly* what was changed or added.

Here is an example showing the "default" behavior of cvs2rss.pl versus the "compare changes URL" behavior:

Version 1.123.2.5 of "sge_event_master.c", default cvs2rss.pl URL
Version 1.123.2.5 of "sge_event_master.c", the comparative URL

Nice hack, huh?

The RSS feed works best for single-file commits as it will generate links that point directly at the above mentioned "colored diff" URL hosted at the gridengine.sunsource.net website. For cases where *many* file changes are committed at the same time, the best we can do is link generically to the gridengine.sunsource.net CVS browsing page.

Please check this out and let me know if it is useful. Currently I'm generating the RSS manually but it should be easy to automate if people actually find it worthwhile.

gridengine.info : Tag sourcecode, everything about sourcecode

RSS feed for recent gridengine source code changes