Made some good progress on the backlog today. Fixed some bugs, applied some patches. Noticing that without me around, things still get followed up on, to a point, for example incomplete test cases for bugs get corrected so they work. This is a very good thing. Community!

I had to stop going through the backlog when I got to one message from Anarcat mentioning quvi. That turns out to be just what is needed to implement the often-requested feature of git-annex addurl supporting YouTube and other similar sites. So I spent the rest of the day making that work. For example:

% git annex addurl --fast 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mxPFHBCfuU&list=PL4F80C7D2DC8D9B6C&index=1'
addurl Star_Wars_X_Wing__Seth_Green__Clare_Grant__and_Mike_Lamond_Join_Wil_on_TableTop_SE2E09.webm ok

Yes, that got the video title and used it as the filename, and yes, I can commit this file and run git annex get later, and it will be able to go download the video! I can even use git annex fsck --fast to make sure YouTube still has my videos. Awesome.

The great thing about quvi is it takes the url to a video webpage, and returns an url that can be used to download the actual video file. So it simplifies ugly flash videos as far out of existence as is possible. However, since the direct url to the video file may not keep working for long. addurl actually records the page's url, with an added indication that quvi should be used to get it.