growing up and out

when i used to write KDE Traffic (the ancient mutant ancestor of today's much, much better commit digest) it was quite possible to keep up with all the email traffic on pretty well all the kde mailing lists with an hour or so a day. i'd spend one afternoon a week, usually on the weekend, tidying up all those threads and turning out a KDE Traffic issue covering all those mailing lists. it's a slightly different ballgame today, and i can't even imagine putting out KDE Traffic without spending insane numbers of hours on it now.

i've also noticed that i can't keep up with the kde commits mailing list either. over the last 6 months we've averaged 327 commits per day, 7 days a week. this past month that number was 12 higher (~3% increase over average, though these numbers are somewhat seasonal; we were at this rate in the summer as well). it's pretty hard to read through 300+ commit logs per day.

we thrive on peer review, though. it's a big part of how we keep things together with this crazy group of people frenetically coding and committing around the world 24-7. what to do?

well, that's where commit filter comes in. it lets you subscribe to just the projects you're interested in and get those messages. it's yet one more piece of the really cool infrastructure around the kde project, and it lets us all pay attention to just the parts we care to, keeping peer review alive even in these days of 300+ commits.

there's also kmail's filtering that can separate the niagra falls like stream of commit messages into multiple folders.

so if you aren't already watching the commits, mostly out of fear of drowning, you may want to look into the above tools. help keep peer review alive and well!

speaking of useful tools, Frerich blogged about his backporting script that makes porting changes from one branch to another in svn a one-liner on the command prompt. ni-i-ice!