Announcing nntpgit

When kernel.org went down, it took the mainline kernel commits list with it. That had a fairly serious and unfortunate effect on my workflow, which, among other things, depends on knowing what's being merged. I hacked up various workarounds, but none of them were as useful or efficient.

Eventually it occurred to me that what I *really* wanted was the commit stream as an NNTP feed so I could read it in gnus along with most of the other lists I follow. The result was nntpgit, a small Python3 program that tracks repository branches and makes new commits available as "articles" to all comers. I've been working with it for a few weeks now and I'm quite happy; it works better for me than the old list did.

Should anybody wish to experiment with it, they can do so in two ways. First, the code is available (GPLv2) from:

	git://git.lwn.net/nntpgit.git

Alternatively, it's running on port 8119 on git.lwn.net. There are currently two "newsgroups": lwn.mainline for mainline commits, and lwn.networking for davem's networking tree. I expect to add others over time.

Be warned that this is very early stage software! It does what I need it to do and little else. I've not tested it with any newsreaders other than gnus, so the chances of interoperability problems with others are significant. I'd be happy to accept bug reports, though, and even happier to take patches. I hope it's useful to somebody.

jon