Araknide

Automation pipeline for generating draft reports of KDE application activity from GitLab data.

Designed to support This Week in KDE Apps (TWiKA) by reducing the manual effort required to identify and structure meaningful updates across hundreds of repositories.

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Context

KDE publishes weekly updates summarizing notable changes across its applications.

This requires contributors to:

• Review large volumes of commits and merge requests
• Identify changes relevant to users (features, UI improvements, major fixes)
• Ignore low-signal technical noise
• Rewrite technical content into user-friendly summaries

This process is time-intensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale.

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Problem

“That’s the hard part.” — KDE Maintainers

Automatically identifying meaningful changes is non-trivial because:

• Most commits are not user-relevant
• Commit quality and structure vary
• Important changes are not always explicitly labeled
• Human judgment is still required for final output

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Approach

Araknide focuses on solving the 80% problem:

Instead of fully automating reporting, it generates a structured draft that significantly reduces manual effort.

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What It Does

• Collects merged commits and merge requests from KDE repositories
• Filters entries using known commit conventions:
  • BUG:
  • FEATURE:
  • GUI:
  • CHANGELOG:
• Groups results by project
• Outputs a structured Markdown draft

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Key Idea

Araknide is not a replacement for human editors — it is a force multiplier.

It:

• Surfaces potentially relevant changes
• Reduces noise
• Provides a starting point for editorial refinement

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Pipeline

GitLab API
    ↓
Repository & Commit Collection
    ↓
Keyword Filtering + Heuristics
    ↓
Project Grouping
    ↓
Markdown Draft Generation

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Design Challenges

1. Signal vs Noise

Most commits are not meaningful to end users.

2. Inconsistent Annotations

Not all developers use keywords consistently (FEATURE:, GUI:).

3. Human-Centric Output

Raw commit messages are not suitable for publication without rewriting.

4. Scale

KDE spans hundreds of repositories and large datasets.

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Origin

This project was developed in response to a KDE task to:

Automate the collection and structuring of weekly application updates for TWiKA

The goal is to make reporting:

• Sustainable
• Scalable
• Contributor-friendly

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License

GPL-3.0