feature request: recent activity

[hannesm]

there should be an atom feed (and/or html page) describing recent activity. data can be harvested via the commits (just needs some article option -> article option -> html/atom function afaics)

help is welcome (I won't have time to do that)

[gjaldon]

@hannesm I'd like to take this on. Where do you see the article option -> article option -> html/atom function being implemented?

I'm initially thinking of implementing it this way:

• Match on "recent_activity" path/uri in Canopy_dispatch.dispatcher and render html content that lists the activity (from commit messages) and their corresponding timestamp.
• Not sure when to return an atom feed but I'm thinking to match on "recent_activity.atom" or "atom/recent_activity" path and then render an atom feed with the same content above

Will probably limit the activity list to the 10 latest commits/activities. WDYT? What did you have in mind for the content in this recent_activity page/feed?

[hannesm]

Great to hear!

I think this sounds good: recent_activity and recent_activity.atom (please not /atom/XXX, we might want to populate that later with atom feeds filtered by tag(s)).

10 or 20 items sounds good to me, in Canopy_store.fill_cache you already iterate over all the commits, and this is where I'd also cache the recent activity feed: before adding to the KeyMap, do a diff (where the diff needs to be implemented using roughly the signature mentioned above:

• a new article is added (None -> Some article -> html/atom)
• an article is deleted (or moved, I guess we're not really able to detect moves in a first iteration) (Some article -> None -> html/atom)
• an article is modified (Some article -> Some article' -> html/atom)

The html/atom should denote that we want to have one function which generates the content diff, and use that both for the html and for the atom case (obviously, start with either html or atom first, once that works, we can move stuff around). I'd expect that function to life in Canopy_content, calling out to Canopy_article.

[gjaldon]

Looks like Canopy_store.fill_cache only iterates on every file that's in the repo but not every commit. How to iterate through every commit using Irmin? Or should I use Irmin for that?

I found an article which I think might help. Not sure if I'm on the right track though.

[hannesm]

oh, you're right... likely somewhere hidden in here: http://docs.mirage.io/odoc/irmin/Irmin/index.html -- sorry, haven't yet used a fold/iter over the commits.. or further down http://docs.mirage.io/odoc/git/Git/index.html -- the Store.History (in Canopy_store) should have some functionality for this

[gjaldon]

Thanks to @samoht's help in the mirage-devel's mailing list I'm no longer stuck but need some advice on how to move forward.

So fill_cache iterates over every file in the HEAD of master(or some other remote branch specified in the remote git url). We walk through the history of commits in Canopy_store.created_updated_ids(specifically the aux fun) to get the create and update times of each file in HEAD of master. So we are unable to find out if a file was deleted or moved unless we make a bunch of changes to how fill_cache/created_updated_ids work.

I'm thinking of doing the ff:

• Create a separate cache which would be a list of activities. Maybe have a Canopy_store.fill_history_cache.
• We fill up this list of activities by iterating through history of commits starting with HEAD and then walk through each file in the commits. We get the diffs of each file which we use to fill up the activities list until we reach a list of 10/20 and then stop iterating through the rest of history.

What do you think?

[gjaldon]

Without any changes, compiling suddenly fails for me today with the following errors: https://gist.github.com/gjaldon/1564596a68371d5625dbfd21ce0eac66

What could have caused this? I tried doing make clean and then make again but that did not change things. Could doing an opam install package affect the building of this package?

[hannesm]

as mentioned on IRC, the error is due to line 100 in canopy_store... irmin 0.10 needs a value >>= fun content here, where irmin 0.11 requires value () >>= fun content. unfortunately we're not yet able to express version constraints in config.ml...

[hannesm]

As written in other issues, I moved on to using a static site generator and unipi. Thanks for all the work.