watchthelight labs

Keeping up with related projects

The projects ours build on, and the ones working on the same hardware, move fast. I follow them in three layers.

1. Discord feed, live

  • Org webhook: every commit, issue, PR and release in watchthelight-labs posts to one Discord channel.
  • upstream-watch (an Action in watchthelight-labs/.github, every 10 minutes): my pull requests to upstream projects, comments and reviews on them, merges, and mentions of me.
  • related-watch (an Action in research, every 3 hours): new releases and commits in every project the scout follows, plus new comments from other people on our issues, especially ones with logs.

2. The scout, daily

The upstream-scout skill is the deep version. It runs at 09:00 from a scheduled task (Windows Task Scheduler; launchd on macOS), at the end of every /legion-check (quick mode), and whenever I ask.

  1. Collect. scan.py asks GitHub what changed since its cursor in about 60 related repos: commits (including feature branches), releases, merged PRs, issues that mention our hardware. It also searches GitHub for projects we don't know yet, and drops star lists and link dumps.

  2. Read. Parallel readers go through the actual diffs and threads and answer the same questions for each one:

    • What changed?
    • Does it unblock or contradict something of ours?
    • Can we use it (licence)?
    • How sure are we?

    A web sweep covers the forums.

  3. Record.

    • A write-up per project in the research repo, with a link for every claim.
    • A row in the project tracker's Research sheet.
    • A comment on any of our issues it bears on.
    • User logs from our issues go into the research repo, redacted.

  4. Credit. Anything we learned from gets a line in that repo's credits section the same day, and claims it made false get corrected.

The first run found, among other things, that another project had the same Linux-driver-on-XNU architecture as ours drawing a full desktop on the GPU. It also found two of their bug fixes that apply to us directly.

3. Logs as research

Every log (ours from each boot attempt, and the ones users post) ends up in watchthelight-labs/research, sorted by person and machine. That repo's own redactor and privacy check run first.