One Hour to Save the Commit Digest?
Ok, let me put it another way – can you spare an hour to help keep the Commit Digest going?
Danny has brought back the Commit Digest, spent a lot of time and effort on the Enzyme infrastructure to make it easy for multiple people to collaborate and, well, is an all-round hero.
Can you send emails?
However, the Commit Digest is a lot of work and he needs help. In particular, Danny needs people to organise the introductory pieces that you see at the start of the Digest, describing some new development in a bit of detail – in Commit Digest speak, to be a ‘Feature Editor’.
This is actually quite an easy and quick job, but if it doesn’t get done it can hold the rest of the Digest up, delay its release and ultimately kill it off for a while as happened before. The great news is that you can help with this without needing any special skills or a lot of time – in fact, based on my experience, about an hour.
I did this task the first week the Digest came out and here’s how it was for me:
- Have a look through the highlighted commits in the enzyme sysem for interesting stuff (~5 minutes)
- Have a quick look at Planet KDE for other things and more information (~5 minutes)
- Find emails for the developers from their sites/Google (5-10 minutes)
- Send them personalised versions of a standard email text asking them to write something for the Digest (~ 10 minutes)
- Read the replies, edit them and forward them to Danny (20-30 minutes)
- Sit back with a warm glow of helping the Commit Digest keep going and seeing how happy people were to see it in the Dot comments (all week)
So there it is. Can you be a KDE hero and help keep the Commit Digest going? If so, sign up on the Commit Digest site.
Heroes already
The following people have already joined Danny in the Commit Digest team that made last couple of Digests possible. In alphabetical order:
- Dominik Tritscher
- Jonathan Thomas
- Marco Krohn
- Marta Rybczynska
- Mutlu Inek
- Tom Vollerthun
- Vincent de Phily
- Xavier Vello
Thanks to all of them for helping to give us something interesting to read with that first cup of coffee on a Monday morning 🙂
Can you join them? Even if you don’t fancy being a Feature Editor there is plenty more to get involved with and larger teams mean less work for everyone and greater stability for the Digest as an ongoing project.
I applied to help. After some struggle I managed to log into Enzyme. I don’t see what I should do next: I see Review and Classify and the pages are both blank.
Talking on IRC the other day showed that other people did not even manage to log in.
Please do explain better what your task 1 means. I’d love to help and other people also would love to but we are at a loss on how doing so…
Ok, I know there were some problems with Enzyme, particularly log-in – I had an email discussion with Danny about passwords when I couldn’t log in but that should be fixed now.
However, as far as I know, everyone who volunteered should have been contacted by Danny. If you haven’t heard anything since volunteering then it is probably best to nudge him (contact email on http://www.dannya.com/about/ in the last paragraph)
The ‘review’ page for me is not blank. By 1. above I meant read through the commits in the ‘review’ page (those are ones selected for possible commit digest inclusion as I understand it) and see if any of them suggest cool features it would be nice to get the developer to talk about – that’s how I picked up the Marble item that I included in the first of the new Digests. For example Commit 1190290 by Sebastian Sauer in that list seems to deal with MSOOXML filters in KOffice, something that could be interesting to a lot of people – not necessarily that fix but the status of MSOOXML in general…
I’m not heavily involved in the Commit Digest – just signed up as a Feature Editor. At the moment there are only two of us I believe and I think we were both quite busy last week which led to a bit of a delay.
I am using Enzyme for a while it so far it works quite good. Also I had no problems with login so far.
For the review / classify page:
* review is meant to pick commits for the diggest
* those ones that were picked will show in the classify page, where area / type can be determined (sometimes this is done automatically)
It also happens to me that both pages (review / classify) are empty. This happens if there are no new commits in the registered modules. In fact, the commit digest worker ants are very fast with classify / review.
Tipps:
* apply for more modules (then your chances of seeing some commits increase)
* check back after about 1 hour (Enzyme looks about every hour for new commit messages)
In general I do not classify my own messages for two reasons:
a) others should have a better chance of seeing commits (and notice that I did some work 😉
b) I like that others double-check what I do (unfortunately, they cannot reject/discuss the commits I have selected => wishlist for Danny)
Sometimes I have a particular reason for including a message (e.g. about koffice charts). While all commits that are shown are not interesting by themselves the overall work on charts in koffice is. In these cases I would appreciate to add a special comment to the message like: “there were more than 20 more commits by Björn Breitmeyer (breitmeyer) on foo bar charts”.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to be an editor (and I also do not possess sufficient language skills). However, if you need ideas about interesting people to interview in the KDE world I certainly have suggestions, e.g.,
* Björn Breitmeyer (breitmeyer) on koffice charts
* David Faure on unit tests
* Sebastian Sauer (sebsauer) on koffice import / export filters
* Milian Wolf on progress in kdevelop (an obvious one from dot.kde.org)
…
Just drop me an email. Also I suggested to set up a mailing list to Danny… but he seems to be too busy to improve Enzyme and the CD.
Cheers!