[darcs-users] increasing participation: patch notifications

[Simon Michael]

Jason Dagit wrote:
> mornings.  The moderation is just for people that have never sent to the 
> list before, patches go through automatically if you're already signed 
> up.  We simply use the moderation as a way to remove spam, while keeping 

Hi Jason, I see. So as a workaround, it sounds like I should subscribe 
to the list to get my patches showing up immediately (I have read via 
gmane for a long time.)

New/casual contributors, the ones we want to entice, won't be 
subscribed, so I still wonder if anything can be done for this case. 
Ideally the moderation would pass through any darcs patch without delay. 
Any chance of that ? This sounds like a trivial issue but as a frequent 
casual contributor to projects I have a good feel for details that make 
participation more enticing.

Thanks for the bot pointers. I found DarcsPatchWatch in lambdabot, 
though it's currently unused. This would be ideal except I believe it 
would require David to install/administer it on darcs.net, which may be 
a tough sell. A bot which monitored the main repo's RSS feed might also 
work, and could be deployed by anyone. I can no longer find that feed 
though, or darcs.cgi/darcsweb (and speaking of which, darcs really needs 
a web interface that's robust enough to use everywhere, particularly ib 
darcs.net).

> want when patches are applied to a repository.  With that said, don't 
> expect David to maintain the solution you want.  He's made it quite 
> clear in the past that we need to keep the main repository setup simple 

..right.

> volunteer to have a buildbot, and then you'd automatic ally get notified 
> when new patches are pushed and perhaps customize your buildbot to 

interesting.

> Now that I've typed all that out, I'm left wonder what we would gain by 
> having a bot tell #darcs that patches are applied.

In my experience (non-noisy) real-time announcements of activity can be 
a good way of increasing visibility, providing rapid feedback, engaging 
developer interest, building community on the irc channel, etc.


Thanks!