See the project website at Rubyforge to file a bug report or submit a feature request.
Blastr observes a version control repository for commits and makes audible announcements out of the commit messages. It currently supports Subversion, Git, and Mercurial on Linux and OS X, possibly on other UNIX-like operating systems as well.
Blastr can observe a “branch” (identified by a URL) by polling the repository for a commit log. Any new commits will be announced. When starting Blastr, it can be told to start observing from a given revision or let it figure out the latest revision and start from that.
The supported version control systems include:
The supported operating systems (for running Blastr) include:
Subversion:
blastr http://svn.acme.com/foo/trunk blastr http://svn.acme.com/foo/trunk 123
Git:
blastr git://github.com/lkoskela/blastr.git blastr git://github.com/lkoskela/blastr.git e528509fddd57194f1c497ce6583f6869e8ed62c
Mercurial:
blastr hg:http://hg.serpentine.com/tutorial/hello blastr hg:http://hg.serpentine.com/tutorial/hello 2
Blastr depends on the git gem (>= 1.0.5). This dependency should be installed automatically when you install Blastr.
Blastr also depends on the standard command line client for the source repository in question being in the user’s PATH. For example, in order to observe a Subversion repository the “svn” executable needs to be in PATH. For Git, the “git” executable needs to be in PATH. For Mercurial, “hg” needs to be in PATH.
Furthermore, Blastr needs a text-to-speech utility for making those commit messages audible. On Mac OS X Blastr uses the built-in “say” utility so Mac users don’t need to worry about this. On Linux, Blastr can utilize Festival and eSpeak.
First, install Blastr and its gem dependencies:
sudo gem install blastr
Then, download and install your chosen version control system’s toolset and make sure it’s on your PATH when running Blastr.
Then, if applicable, download and install a text-to-speech utility for your platform.
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Blastr currently does a full clone operation on every poll for source repositories that don’t support a purely remote operation (like “svn log [URL]”). This may take a while if your repository is big.
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Blastr doesn’t treat non-ASCII characters in commit messages too well. In other words, the developers make no promises whatsoever regarding Blastr’s behavior when encountering weird Norwegian scribble.
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Some folks might want to monitor multiple repositories or multiple paths or branches within a repository at the same time. Currently, this is technically possible by running two instances of Blastr in parallel but every now and then those two instances will speak over each other (i.e. all you can hear is cacophony).
(The BSD License)
Copyright © 2009, Lasse Koskela All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
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Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
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