Digested

Well, since my life is boring and there is so much spare time to use up, we decided to embark on a project. We got ourselves a puppy. A Portuguese Water Dog to be precise. Fun. She is 12 weeks old and has attempted to eat most of the furniture already. She isn't quite old enough for long walks, which I am looking forward to for my own benefit. This experience is whetting my appetite for something deterministic and predictable like software development.

I realized that I had gotten seriously burnt out on the brainwork end of my existence, and have enjoyed not having the pressure of producing the Digest each week. I am getting capable of rational thought again however. And as per my habit, I get thinking. How can I see what is going on in the KDE world without wading through thousands of commits each week? There must be some way of automatically organizing things so that the interesting bits are evident.

So I scribbled a bunch of design stuff on a piece of paper, never to be looked at again. My mind is now cranking away in the background, usually unnoticed, and some glimmerings of ideas are starting to appear. The KDE repository is home to a multitude of projects. There are various applications, sections of the main libraries. A run through the commits for the week would first sort by project. A project would be defined by a list of paths and/or developers. The each commit would be further analyzed for keywords such as feature, bug, bug references, and any other pattern that could be useful in winnowing out the interesting bits. Each project could have specific keywords that are of interest, such as khtml having an url, or something similar. Having the definitions and keywords readily available to the readers would elicit feedback and finetuning (hopefully). I guess the real question is whether this would produce anything useful and interesting.

Now to start coding.