Oliver Steele

Last week I wrote a couple of tools to keep track of subversion checkins:

The Subversion Log Viewer is a master-detail list of recent subversion revisions. It’s based on the OpenLaszlo contactlist example. The nicest feature is really an afterthought: at the last moment, I added faces for authors; I think this makes projects a lot friendlier. Right now it only adds the faces to the OpenLaszlo log; let me know if you’re interested in using this for your own project, and I’ll make a public API for adding faces to a repository.

The Subversion iCalendar Gateway transcodes subversion logs into iCalendar files, that you can subscribe to with Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird. I find it useful for a projects that I want to check in on occasionally. Unlike an RSS feed, it gives you a sense of the activity level and the change frequency, at least if you’re a spatial person like me.

Both of these point at the OpenLaszlo log by default, but they’ve got a UI for putting in any subversion repository (http: or svn: protocol only), and generating a permalink for that repository.

One caveat: It takes a long time to request a complete subversion log, so the iCalendar gateway only requests the first 500 revisions the first time you (or anyone) view a given calendar, and then the next time anyone or refreshes the same calendar, it catches up to the present 500 revisions at time.