I’ve been playing with Planet (one day our galactic masters will populate that page and take advantage of the links they receive), which meant learning a bit of arch to create my own working copy which I can check revisions into. (I believe this is called a branch if I understand arch’s nesting correctly: archives contain categories which contain branches which contain versions which contain revisions. Revisions correspond to individual checkins, archives to a CVS repository and categories, roughly, to a project.)
So now my Planet variant pings the weblog update sites if the data has changed &mdash although I think the way it detects changes is against the spirit of the feed parser. Doing this has proved an excuse to spend an hour or so coming to grips with arch finally, which I wasn’t motivated to do for its own sake.
I think arch would be a great tool for people like myself who want to get people to double-check changes before checking them into the project’s main branch, and for people like spiv, who has thrown away a lot of changes to Twisted because he’d made a lot of distinct changes in his tree and was a bit anxious about trying to merge them with recent changes in the main tree before isolating each change and checking it in. Distributed repositories are an excellent solution to this: you can check changes into your own repository without effecting the “main” one, and then pick them out, merge and commit to the main one.