Stumbled across a superb piece of CVS mastery -- this CVSMonitor thing is CVS Nirvana. I've searched high and low for something half decent and this exceeds all expectations.
We're running an open source content management code base (FarCry) which we're now reporting on using CVSMonitor:
http://code.daemon.com.au/
CVSMonitor is open source (of course!) and trawls through your nominated CVS modules (read only access required) graphing and revealing recent commits, important changes and developer activity. The Karma rating is a nice touch -- something developers earn by committing code, and commenting their submissions.
As good as it is, I might be so bold as to make a couple of feature requests:
- front page karma (this ought to be monthly or weekly to provide better incentive for active developers :) -- perhaps a configurable option?
- any chance of capturing the commit listings as RSS? That way the feed could be syndicated to any news reader or aggregator.
- is there a way to automate the repository scan for updates?? Ideally something I could hit with an HTTP agent periodically to initiate an update.
What does everyone else use to monitor CVS changes?
Updated Tue, 20-May-2003
Adam Kennedy (the creator of CVSMonitor -- and another Aussie to boot!) got in touch with me and had this to say about automating the import:
"The normal way to do the update is via a cron job thorgh the cvsexec.pl script... If you wanted to do it via the web, you could just use the url that is used when you click on the "Update" link for the reopsitory in the admin section. Of course, you'll have to make sure that the password is included ( ... looks at the source code to try and remember how it's implemented ... ) by using the _admin_pass option."
"For example, cvsmonitor.pl?_admin_pass=PASSWORD&cmd=adminBackgroundUpdateAll"
Which incidentally is spot on -- FarCry's code base is being inspected nightly at the moment...
"That looks about right from here... It should take about 5 seconds to return, and the update will have been forked into the background. The update should take as long as it normally does through the browser, probably a little less because it doesn't have to generate the pages for the admin refreshes. Of course, if you can, use the cron route."
Am working on him to see if I can't work out an RSS export :)
Posted by modius at 11:20 PM | Permalink
Trackback: http://blog.daemon.com.au/cgi-bin/dmblog/mt-tb.cgi/121
I hate to ask this - but can someone give me a hand trying to get this darn thing working right? I'm a newbie at linux so I'm sure I'm doing something stupid.
Posted by: Raymond Camden on May 21, 2003 01:44 AM