Polymorph: Zak Greant's Blog
November 22nd, 2007

Life on the Lagging Edge: Greasemonkey Rocks!

I've been doing some interesting work (though, perhaps only to me) on the OSI mailing lists over the last week (which I'll be writing about later). A lot of it has involved far too much manual processing of data from mailing list archives. In particular, I've found that I'm doing the following over and over again: turning something like this:

<title>license-discuss@opensource.org: 14864: Re: Call for Votes: New OSI-Editors List</title>

<various bits of odd HTML>

Subject: Re: Call for Votes: New OSI-Editors List
From: "Chris DiBona" <cdibona@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 06:07:33 -0800

</various>

into something like this:

Submitted by Chris DiBona on 2007-11-22T06:07:33-0800 to the license-discuss@opensource.org mailing list in message [license-discuss:14864]

and then dumping it into Trac.

Blech.

I finally fired up my circa-1999 javascript skills and worked up my first Greasemonkey script to take care of some of the grunt work for me. Let me be the umpteenth person to say it. Greasemonkey is awesome!

You can grab a copy of the script here - visit pages in the crynwr.com OSI mailing list archives (such as http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:14787) to see it in action.

Of course, you'll need to be running Greasemonkey and Firefox to make the script go.

Update: Later This Evening

I've added a bit of ajax to go out and fetch a list of related tickets (if any) to a given message. eg. If I visit http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3:mss:13076 the script will give me a link to ticket #66: Reciprocal Public License v1.5

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Posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 16:28

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