20 Apr 2005

Change reporting

How to communicate code changes? I could send email, I could maybe read some of the reports from CruiseControl, or I could look at Fisheye (or an open source alternative, such as CvsChangeLogBuilder).

FishEye is nice, but I don’t find the need for most of what it can do. What I do use is a text and RSS feed of CVS commit messages. Sure, FishEye does that, but as that’s all I want I’ll save my US$999 and use a Perl script called cvs2cl that does the job.

cvs co my-projectcd my-project
# Text version
cvs2cl.pl  --stdout -l "-d>1 month ago" > $OUT/changelog.txt

# RSS version:cvs2cl.pl  --xml --stdout -l "-d>1 month ago" > $OUT/changelog.xml
xsltproc  filter-cvs2cl.xslt $OUT/changelog.xml > $OUT/changelog.rss

Right now I have that running on the hour every hour, but it’s probably not too hard to plug it into a build tool or even have it run after a CVS commit event.