Solutions for the missing Rails-Commit mailing list

The Rails-Commit mailing list has been down since August 19, and though it was a nice relief from the ADHD of the core team for a while, it is really useful to follow what’s being committed, especially since I have 3 production applications running Edge.

I asked Marcel Molina and Jamis Buck, and it turns out the old rails-commit mailing list is simply dead, and the only alternative is the Timeline RSS feed from Trac.

There’s no way to get a feed that includes complete diffs of each change, but Marcel offered the tip, that if you install Thunderbird, it’ll actually grab the page that’s being linked to, so you can in fact see the diffs right in the RSS reader.

It’s not perfect. There’s a slight delay while it fetches the page, and I don’t use Thunderbird for anything else, so I’d have to install and keep it open just for this, but it does do the job, and it’s the only known option currently.

It would be great with an RSS feed that had the diffs in the body. There’s be many ways to accomplish this. Maybe someone has written something for Apache that produces an RSS feed from Subversion. Maybe one could make a patch for Trac.

Or, with even less work, we could change the post-commit hook on dev.rubyonrails.org to email a Google group, which people could subscribe to by email, or use something like MailBucket or SocialMail to get it in their RSS reader. I personally this is a perfect match for RSS.