Edgy Developments

As a Ruby on Rails developer it can be helpful to keep an eye on changes being made to Edge Rails (the latest developmental Rails code base). Sometimes you’ll spot specific fixes for issues you’ve run into, or see neat stuff that is won’t make it into an actual Rails release for quite a while. I thought the ideal way to keep track of this would be an RSS feed of all the changes. A quick search on the subject didn’t turn up anything, so I found two ways to accomplish this.

The first method is generally applicable to any Subversion repository. It involves outputting the Subversion change log, and then using a nifty XSLT created by Martin Pittenauer. I did modify the XSLT slightly so that it puts the commit comments in the title (rather than just the revision number and author). Here’s the command-line business to generate the RSS for updates over the past week:

svn log http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk -r {`date --date='1 week ago' +%Y-%m-%d`}:{`date +%Y-%m-%d`} --xml -v > rails-changes.xml
xsltproc ../svnlog.xslt rails-changes.xml > rails-changes.rss

I set up a cron job, which hourly updates this RSS at http://rails-changes.dreamhosters.com/rails-changes.rss, although I find that with Google Reader the updates are quite slow.Of course, after all this effort I found that there’s a better way. Since the Rails project uses Trac, I found that Icould just customize the ‘Timeline’ page and then use the RSS feed link at the bottom. This link reproduces what I did above, without all the effort.