mr.cabot 1.0

A utility for finding and mapping contributions to open source projects

About

mr.cabot is a tool for allowing software projects to map where their contributions are coming from. It reads data form common sources like GitHub, gmane and stackoverflow and attempts to locate where those contributors are physically located.

Basic usage

You need to customise your mr.cabot.cfg config file to match your software project. The basic format is that the sources line lists the sections that supply lists of contributors and users lists the sections that supply lists of contributors.

Only the GitHub sources support user enumeration at the moment, but stackoverflow and gmane both extract geolocation information where possible.

Example

The current example from the Plone project generates the following:

Source types

github

type

github

key

the name of the organisation to be scanned

token

an oauth token, preferably one with the repo scope. See https://help.github.com/articles/creating-an-oauth-token-for-command-line-use

checkout_directory

an existing directory to cache checkouts in to save on bandwidth

git

type

git

key

a clone url of a git repository

stackoverflow

type

stackoverflow

key

a tag used on stack overflow

days

the number of days of history to download

gmane

type

gmane

key

the full gmane newsgroup name

messages

downloads the last x messages

Output types

Output type defaults to a google static map, but can be selected using –output type on the command line.

The available options are:

• googlestaticmap

• html

• kml

Caching

No caching of geolocation data is included as yet, but data runs are cached under var/data, with the filename yyyy-mm-dd.pickle. This allows you to re-run old data sets if you are changing display methods.

To load a pickle instead of re-scanning use the –pickle command line option:

./bin/cabot --pickle ./var/data/2013-01-05.pickle --output kml

Additionally, there is a command line option to skip pulling git repositories. This is useful for re-running when you are tweaking the config file initially, as updating git is the slowest section:

./bin/cabot -N --output kml