Blog

It has been a while since my last post - coming up to 3 months actually (wow! i'll try and blog more often this year!). In this post i'll try and give an update of all the important things that have happened in KDE Commit-Digest town recently, and where we're heading into the future.

Firstly, issue 161 has just been released: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2010-12-05/

The eagle-eyed amongst you will see that Vladislav Blanton is the chief editor of this issue, I thought this was only fair as he's done a lot of good work on this issue! This also ties in with my desire and need to step back from being the chief editor. Hopefully this is not a surprise - my plan from the beginning of the relaunch has been to get a thriving (and sustainable!) Commit-Digest set up, and then harness this raw human power to take over the world put it into other capable hands, whilst still providing technical and operational support when needed.

We have a mailing list now, and i've been really pleased to see different volunteers pick up different tasks to get Digest production moving forward. Thanks specifically to Vladislav Blanton, Alexander van Loon, Mutlu Inek, and Roger Pixley, and also to those volunteers who are contacting, writing, and proofreading articles, and of course reviewing / classifying commits!



Others will no doubt also notice the date of this issue, which is still a month behind real-time.

I'll be honest: when I was working on relaunching the Digest way back in September, I probably underestimated the technical work required to build Enzyme as a distributed creation platform, but most importantly, the work required to both get Digests out the door and manage the community of volunteer helpers.

Still, 9 Digests have been released in that time, with the remaining 5 under construction.

It has definitely taken time, but I can feel a real momentum building now with the infusion of new people into the team. For a fully sustainable publication (with a realistic, fluctuating workload) however, a few more people would be nice. Many of you out there have the skills and time to help, and there is an easy learning curve with support from the team to get started - take Vladislav, who only signed up a few weeks back and already has 1 Digest to his name! So, do consider volunteering.

Another thing that caught me slightly off guard has been the speed of the transition of KDE projects to Git. This has meant slightly reworking Enzyme in order to integrate multiple simultaneous repositories. I designed the new system from the beginning to be flexible - essentially each data source is a plugin - so this wasn't too difficult, just time consuming. Digests with Git commits within should therefore start to appear over the next few weeks.

The interfaces of both Enzyme and the Commit-Digest frontend website are now being translated through the KDE i18n framework and group of volunteers (a first for external KDE websites I believe), and I hope to add the functionality to translate actual Digest introductions and feature articles over the coming months.

I am also pleased to announce that i've also released the Commit-Digest frontend website as open source too - this now provides a complete, integrated end-to-end system which can be easily adjusted for different development communities. I would love to see other projects adopt this system for their outreach efforts (yes, even the GNOME Commit-Digest! ;)) and hope to see an ecosystem of developer demystification sprout up soon!



Finally, I am now on Twitter! Follow me at @bombayzy

I'm really happy to announce that the first issue of the relaunched KDE Commit-Digest is now online for your reading pleasure!

All this is built upon Enzyme, my project-independent open source web platform for distributed creation of Commit-Digests. I've been somewhat overwhelmed with the work required so far - i've spent a lot of my spare time for what seems like months now working on this! - and starting / managing a new small community has been a new, challenging experience for me. But I have been repeatedly motivated to continue through the harder parts by the many people who have helped me get the server running (thanks KDE sysadmins!) or have given me feedback on the Enzyme system, and the people who have volunteered so far because they believe in this project.

My last post was a call for help and was effective, but as I thought, some of the people who signed up have not contributed so far - much of this is my fault, as Enzyme has been broken to varying degrees over the last few weeks :)

However, after so much work, the technical issues should be mostly in the past now. Therefore, I warmly welcome contributions from people who can contribute on a regular basis. All skills are needed (classifiers / reviewers, translators, etc), but especially critical are editors - people who can contact developers to get the feature pieces you see at the top of each Digest. Stuart Jarvis has done an excellent job this week, but he is one of only two people who have volunteered for this task, so many more people are needed for a sustainable Digest.

There are also other ways to help which do not involve such a long term commitment (one of these is donating money!) which will help me build the KDE Commit-Digest into a strong and truly sustainable regular publication. Thanks for sticking with me so far, and enjoy!

The Enzyme platform is ready.
I built it, but they have not come!

I can't hide my disappointment here: 8 people have so far volunteered (and I thank them), but it's not enough.
I estimate that I need a core of at least 30 people to sustain a weekly Digest - even at this participation level, that's about 83 commits that each person needs to review per week.
Reviewers, editors, and translators are all still urgently needed.

I know from experience that people can drop out or have less productive weeks due to events in their offline lives, and so there also needs to be a buffer - more people are always better!

So please volunteer if you can spare some time out of your week on an ongling basis: http://enzyme.commit-digest.org/

I've spent a lot of time recently - especially in the past month - working on bringing this back to you because I believed there was a big demand for this publication. I really hope I was not mistaken!

A couple of people have left a comment on my last post saying that the "apply" buttons are not working for them (though i've got some emails through those buttons, so it's probably just you :)).

Anyway, anyone who wants to contribute to the relaunch of the KDE Commit-Digest can send an email to danny -at- commit-digest.org with your details and the volunteer job that you're interested in, and we'll get started!

I also wanted to clear up the uncertainty about reviewing commits on Enzyme: yes, you *can* specify which areas you'd like to review (you can even specify multiple areas), so reviewing just kde-edu or koffice is available for those with specific interests - however if too many people only apply to review certain popular modules there'll be an imbalance, so we're going to need general reviewers too!

There are actually two steps when reviewing commits to create a Digest:

• Reviewing, where commits are read to see if they are worthy for inclusion
• Classifying, where the selected commits are sorted into areas like kde-edu, koffice (which is partly automated), and by type (such as bug fix, feature, etc)

Enzyme treats these two steps separately, so you can choose to volunteer for only one (or both) of these production stages.

It helps if you are more technically-minded to be a reviewer (see the second half of this entry to see if you can decipher commit messages!), as you need to be able to judge if a commit is worthy for inclusion based on the sometimes-complex commit messages. However, the classifying stage is very simple, so don't be put off volunteering if you're no expert on the code.

Additionally, you can do as much (or as little!) reviewing and classifying as you like: the AJAX interface lets you save your work as you go along, and other people will pick up where you left off.

The Second Half
I also had something else I wanted to talk about in this post.

When I used to be an IRC inhabitant, one of the channels I always had open in a Konversation tab was #kde-commits.
Although I only looked at it from time to time, I loved the feeling of vitality and energy seeing KDE commits fly-by in realtime (especially when you saw a commit you had just made!)

As I was preparing to relaunch the KDE Commit-Digest and rewriting all the code, I was thinking of ways to improve the user experience as well as the code, and one of the new features I thought of was Commit Spy.

Commit Spy is a live feed of commits to KDE (sourced from cia.vc) which updates at most every 1 minute - this can be changed according to your own preference.
It is AJAX-powered ^TM, meaning you don't have to refresh the page to see new commits.



Even better is the live filtering (see below), allowing you to restrict commits by account, commit path fragment (eg. /koffice/), or words in the commit message.



I'll try and leave at least a few more days until the next post... until then, keep volunteering and enjoy spying!

I've been silent for over a month now since my last blog entry about bringing back the KDE Commit-Digest, but it was for good reason, as I have been hard at work on two things:

1. Working on completing the first working version of Enzyme, the web platform for creating Commit-Digests.
2. Renovating the commit-digest.org website to interface with Enzyme, and making it nicer in general.

These steps have taken longer than I expected - especially step 2, as it involved me rewriting the code of the website (this was needed as I started originally learning PHP by making the Digest website, and I have learnt a lot about web development over the past 4 years!).

The concept of Enzyme is of a project-independent (and eventually SCM-agnostic) tool for creating regular project reports and assisting interesting statistical analysis. I have released Enzyme under an open source licence (Affero GPL version 3, unless anyone has any objections) to allow anyone to view and edit the code, or setup an Enzyme instance for their own project.

The good news is that I have finally finished the first working version (i'll fix any issues that come with real world use and feedback), and so I enter the second stage of the relaunch, which involves you...

Now that I have created the distributed platform for producing Digests, the success of the relaunch depends on how many people step up and volunteer over a long term basis.
There are 3 main ways you can contribute, which are listed at http://commit-digest.org/contribute/:

• Commit Reviewers look at all the recent commits made to KDE, selecting those which are significant and interesting enough to be included into the weekly Commit-Digest.
• Feature Editors contact people working on interesting projects within KDE and assist them in writing original pieces which are presented in the introduction of each Commit-Digest.
• Translators increase the reach of the Commit-Digest and the work done across KDE by making the weekly Commit-Digests (and the website interfaces) available in the native language of people around the world.

All these volunteer jobs can be applied for at http://commit-digest.org/contribute/

I'll introduce Enzyme and talk about the other cool stuff i've been doing around this in more blog posts over the next few days!

At the start of the year, Jos Poortvliet asked me if the KDE Commit-Digest was coming back soon.

He knew that it would be hard for me to find the time to restart the Digest in its previous form (with me as the only person working on it!), but I told him about my plans to make a web application to enable many distributed volunteers to each do a small part to create the larger Digest.

At the time, I was feeling inspired and so set to work creating Enzyme, the platform for creating Digests!

However, although my initial prototype implementation was coming along nicely, things were taking longer than expected, and real life again got in the way during the harsh winter...

Six months later (so, a week ago!) a powerful feeling took hold of me (much like the one that inspired me to resurrect the Commit-Digest originally) - the feeling to restart work on Enzyme, and create a team of volunteers to assist me with the heavy lifting required to publish a reinvigorated Digest.

So this is the purpose of this blog entry: to announce that I am working towards this goal essentially full-time, and that the KDE Commit-Digest will be returning soon!

I plan to post regular updates of my progress at this blog, and will be asking for committed volunteers closer to the relaunch date (for reading commits, creating original introductory content, and more). Stay tuned!