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SVN::Notify 2.0 Hitting CPAN

My latest Perl module, SVN::Notify 2.00, has hit CPAN. This is a port of my widely-used activitymail CVS notification script to Subversion. But it underwent quite a few changes over the port, including:

Modularization
The old monolithic activitymail script is gone. It has been replaced with a Perl class, SVN::Notify, that does most of the work. The new script, svnnotify, is essentially just a wrapper around the class; all it does is process command-line arguments and then pass the results to SVN::Notify.
Simplification
Subversion’s system for hooking in to commit transactions is far better thought-out than that of CVS. It’s now easy to capture the results of an entire commit in a single transaction, without having to write out temp files to keep track of where we are and to concatenate diffs. As a result, SVN::Notify has a much simpler architecture and implementation that requires fewer third-party modules to do its work. In addition, the move to a class should make it much easier to build on SVN::Notify in the future than it was with activitymail. Autrijus Tang already suggested a number of ideas on IRC, including SVN::Notify::Jabber or SVN::Notify::Export. Have at it, everyone!
Reduced Resource Usage
I had heard some complaints that, on very large commits, activitymail could end up taking up a huge amount of memory. As best I could figure, this was because it was loading everything into memory, including the diff for the commit! SVN::Notify avoids this problem by using a file handle to read in a diff an print it to sendmail one line at a time. This should keep resource usage by SVN::Notify way below what activitymail used.
Context-Specific Notifications
SVN::Notify has added support for mapping email addresses to regular expressions. Whenever a regular expression matches the name of one or more of the directories affected in a single commit, the corresponding email address will be added to the list of recipients of the notification. This is a great way to get notification messages sent to particular email addressed based on what part of the Subversion tree was affected by a commit. I intend to use this to set it up so that a list of translators only get notification about a commit when it changes a directory related to localization in my projects, so that they can ignore commits to other parts of the application.

These are the major changes, but SVN::Notify also features a number of smaller improvements over its activitymail ancestor, including character set support, user domain support for the “From” header, explicit specification of a “From” header, properly escaped content when sending HTML-formatted notifications, and a maximum subject length configuration.

So what did it lose? Just a few things:

  • syncmail-like behavior. Did anyone ever use this? If so, feel free to implement SVN::Notify::Syncmail.
  • Arguments to diff. SVN::Notify just uses svnlook diff to generate a diff. Support for other diffs could be added in a future version, if people really need it.
  • New directories and imports can no longer be ingored, because in Subversion they’re really no different from any other commit.
  • Limit on the maximum size of the email. This is because SVN::Notify no longer loads the entire email into memory to measure it.
  • Excluding certain files from the diff. Subversion handles this itself by paying attention to the media type of each file.
  • Windows support. Actually, I’m not sure if activitymail was ever used on Windows, but the new method of using pipes to communicate with other processes isn’t supported by Windows, as near as I can tell. There are comments in the code for those who wish to do the port; it would probably be easy using Win32::Process.

Not too much, eh? Let me know what you think, and send feedback!

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