I’ve used Subversion very occasionally since 2009, and SVN::Notify at all. Over the years, I’ve fixed minor issues with it now and then, and made the a couple of releases to address issues fixed by others. But it’s past the point where I feel qualified to maintain it. Hell, the repository for SVN::Notify has been hosted on GitHub ever since 2011. I don’t have an instance of Subversion against which to test it; nor do I have any SMTP servers to throw test messages at.

In short, it’s past time I relinquished maintenance of this module to someone with a vested interest in its continued use. Is that you? Do you need to keep SVN::Notify running for your projects, and have a few TUITs to fix the occasional bug or security issue? If so, drop me a line (david @ this domain). I’d be happy to transfer the repository.

I’ve kept my various Perl modules in a Subversion server run by my Bricolage support company, Kineticode, for many years. However, I’m having to shut down the server I’ve used for all my services, including Subversion, so I’ve moved them all to GitHub. As such, I no longer use Subversion in my day-to-day work.

It no longer seems appropriate that I maintain SVN::Notify. This has probably been my most popular modules, and I know that it’s used a lot. It’s also relatively stable, with few bug reports or complaints. Nevertheless, there certainly could be some things that folks want to add, like TLS support, I18N, and inline CSS.

Therefore, SVN::Notify is formally up for adoption. If you’re a Subversion users, it’s a great tool. Just look at this sample output. If you’d like to take over maintenance, make it even better, please get in touch. Leave a comment on this post, or @theory me on Twitter, or send an email.

PS: Would love it if someone also could take over activitymail, the CVS notification script from which SVN::Notify was derived — and which I have even less right to maintain, given that I haven’t used CVS in years.

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Just a quick followup on the completion of the Bricolage Git migration last week, today I completed writing up a set of GitHub wiki documents explaining to my fellow Bricoleurs how to start hacking. The most important bits are:

• Working with Git, explaining how to get set up with a forked Bricolage repository
• Contributing a Bug Fix, an intro to the Git way of doing things (as far as I understand it)
• Working with Branches, describing how to track a maintenance branch in your fork
• Merging with Git, to cover the frequent merging from Bricolage maintenance branches into master, and how to get said merges pushed upstream
• Starting a Project Branch, which you’d need to read if you were taking on a major development task, such as a Summer of Code project
• Contributing via Email, for those who don’t want a GitHub account (needs fleshing out)
• Creating a Release, in which the fine art of branching, tagging, and releasing is covered

If you’re familiar with the “Git way,” I would greatly appreciate your feedback on these documents. Corrections and comments would be greatly appreciated.

I also just wanted to say that the process of reconstructing the merge history from CVS and Subversion was quite an eye-opener for me. Not because it was difficult (it was) and required a number of hacks (it did), but because it highlighted just how much better a fit Git is for the way in which we do Open Source software development. Hell, probably closed-source, too, for that matter. I no longer will have to think about what revisions to include in a merge, or create a branch just to “tag” a merge. Hell, I’ll probably be doing merges a hell of a lot more often, just because it’s so easy, the history remains intact, and everything just stays more up-to-date and closely integrated.

But I also really appreciate the project-based emphasis of Git. A Subversion repository, I now realize, is really very much like a versioned file system. That means where things go is completely ad-hoc, or convention-driven at best. And god forbid if you decide to change the convention and move stuff around! It’s just so much more sane to get a project repository, with all of the history, branches, tags, merges, and everything else, all in one package. It’s more portable, it’s a hell of a lot faster (ever tried to check out a Subversion repository with 80 tags?), and just tighter. it encourages modularization, which can only be good. I’ll tell you, I expect to have some frustrations and challenges as I learn more about using Git, but I’m already very much happier with the overall philosophy.

Enough evangelizing. As a last statement on this, I’ve uploaded the Perl scripts I wrote to do this migration, just in case someone else finds them useful:

• bric_cvs_to_git migrated a CVS backup to Git.
• bric_to_git migrated Subversion from r5517 to Git.
• stitch stitched the CVS-migrated Git repository into the Subversion-migrated Git repository for a final product.

It turned out that there were a few files lost in the conversion, which I didn’t notice until after all was said and done, but overall I’m very happy. My thanks again to Ask and the denizens of #git for all the help.

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Now that I’ve successfully migrated the old Bricolage SourceForge CVS repository to Git, and also migrated Subversion to Git, it’s time to stitch the two repositories together into one with all history intact. I’m glad to say that figuring out how to do so took substantially less time than the first two steps, thanks in large part to the great help from “doener,” “Ilari,” and “Fissure” on the Freenode #git channel.

Actually, they helped me with a bit more tweaking of my CVS and Subversion conversions. One thing I realized after writing yesterday’s post was that, after running git filter-branch, I had twice as many commits as I should have had. It turns out that git filter-branch rewrites all commits, but keeps the old ones around in case you mess something up. doener also pointed out that I wasn’t having all grafts properly applied, because git filter-branch only applies to the currently checked-out branch. To get all of the branches, he suggested that I read the git-filter-branch documentation, where I’ll find that git filter-branch --tag-name-filter cat -- --all would hit all branches. Actually, such was not clear to me from the documentation, but I took his word for it. Once I did that, to get rid of the dupes, all I had to do was git clone the repository to a new repository. And that was that.

This worked great for my CVS migration, but I realized that I also wanted to clean out metadata from the Subversion migration. Of course, git clone throws out most of the metadata, but git svn also stores some metadata at the end of every commit log message, like this:

git-svn-id: file:///Users/david/svn/bricolage/trunk@8581 e630fb3e-2914-11de-beb6-f300316f8eb1

This had been very handy as I looked through commits in GitX to find parents to set up for grafts, but with that done and everything grafted, I no longer needed it. Ilari helped me to figure out how to properly use git filter-branch to get rid of those. To do it, all I had to do was add a filter for commit messages, like so:

git filter-branch --msg-filter \
'perl -0777 -pe "s/\r?\ngit-svn-id:.+\n//ms"' \
--tag-name-filter cat -- --all

This properly strips out that ugly bit of metadata and finalizes the grafts all at the same time. Very nice.

Now it was time to combine these two repositories for a single unified history. I wasn’t able to find a good tutorial for this on the web, other than one that used a third-party Debian utility and only hooked up the master branch, using a bogus intermediary commit to do it. On the other hand, simply copying the pack files, as mentioned in the Git Wiki–and demonstrated by the scripts linked from there–also appeared to be suboptimal: The new commits were not showing up in GitX! And besides, Ilari said, “just copying packs might not suffice. There can also be loose objects.” Well, we can’t have that, can we?

Ilari suggested git-fetch, the documentation for which says that it will “download objects and refs from another repository.” Perfect! I wanted to copy the objects from my CVS migration to the Subversion migration.

My first attempt failed: some commits showed up, but not others. Ilari pointed out that it wouldn’t copy remote branches unless you asked it to do so, via “refspecs.” Since I’d cloned the repositories to get rid of the duplicate commits created by git filter-branch, all of my lovingly recreated local branches were now remote branches. Actually, this is what I want for the final repository, so I just had to figure out how to copy them. What I came up with was this:

chdir $cvs;
my @branches = map { s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; $_ } `git branch -r`;

chdir $svn;
system qw(git fetch --tags), $cvs;

for my $branch (@branches) {
    next if $branch eq 'origin/HEAD';
    my $target = $branch =~ m{/master|rev_1_[68]$} ? "$branch-cvs" : $branch;
    system qw(git fetch --tags), $cvs,
        "refs/remotes/$branch:refs/remotes/$target";
}

It took me a while to figure out the proper incantation for referencing and creating remote branches. Once I got the refs/remotes part figured out, I found that the master, rev_1_6, and rev_1_8 branches from CVS were overwriting the Subversion branches with the same names. What I really needed was to have the CVS branches grafted as parents to the Subversion branches. The #git channel again came to my rescue, where Fissure suggested that I rename those branches when importing them, do the grafts, and then drop the renamed branches. Hence the line above that adds “-cvs” to the names of those branches.

Once the branches were imported, I simply looked for the earliest commits to those branches in Subversion and mapped it to the latest commits to the same branches in CVS, then wrote their SHA1 IDs to .git/info/grafts, like so:

open my $fh, '>', ".git/info/grafts" or die "Cannot open grafts: $!\n";
print $fh '77a35487f18d68b96d294facc1f1a41745ad914c '
        => "835ff47ee1e3d1bf228b8d0976fbebe3c7f02ae6\n", # rev_1_6
            '97ef646f5c2a7c6f47c2046c8d289c1dfc30a73d '
        => "2b9f3c5979d062614ef54afd0a01631f746fa3cb\n", # rev_1_8
            'b3b2e7f53d789bea962fe8047e119148e28865c0 '
        => "8414b64a6a434b2117294c0568c1012a17bc863b\n", # master
    ;
close $fh;

With the branches all imported and the grafts created, I simply had to run git filter-branch to make them permanent and drop the temporary CVS branches:

system qw(git filter-branch --tag-name-filter cat -- --all);
unlink '.git/info/grafts';
system qw(git branch -r -D), "origin/$_-cvs" for qw(rev_1_6 rev_1_8 master);

Now I had a complete repository, but with duplicate commits left over by git-filter-branch. To get rid of those, I need to clone the repository. But before I clone, I need the remote branches to be local branches, so that the clone will see them as remotes. For this, I wrote the following function:

sub fix_branches {
    for my $remote (map { s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; $_ } `git branch -r`) {
        (my $local = $remote) =~ s{origin/}{};
        next if $local eq 'master';
        next if $local eq 'HEAD';
        system qw(git checkout), $remote;
        system qw(git checkout -b), $local;
    }
    system qw(git checkout master);
}

It’s important to skip the master and HEAD branches, as they’ll automatically be created by git clone. So then I call the function and and run git gc to take out trash, and then clone:

fix_branches();

run qw(git gc);
chdir '..';
run qw(git clone), "file://$svn", 'git_final';

It’s important to use the file:/// URL to clone so as to get a real clone; just pointing to the directory instead makes hard links.

Now I that I had the final repository with all history intact, I was ready to push it to GitHub! Well, almost ready. First I needed to make the branches local again, and then see if I could get the repository size down a bit:

chdir 'git_final';
fix_branches();
system qw(git remote rm origin);
system qw(git remote add origin git@github.com:bricoleurs/bricolage.git);
system qw(git gc);
system qw(git repack -a -d -f --depth 50 --window 50);

And that’s it! My new Bricolage Git repository is complete, and I’ve now pushed it up to its new home on GitHub. I pushed it like this:

git push origin --all
git push origin --tags

Damn I’m glad that’s done! I’ll be getting the Subversion repository set to read-only next, and then writing some documentation for my fellow Bricoleurs on how to work with Git. For those of you who already know, fork and enjoy!

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Following up on last week’s post on migrating the old Bricolage SourceForge CVS repository to Git, here are my notes on migrating the current Bricolage Subversion repository to Git.

It turns out that migrating from Subversion is much more of a pain than migrating from CVS. Why? Because CVS has real tags, while Subversion does not. So while git-svn tries to identify all of your tags and branches, it’s really relying on your Subversion repository using standard directories for all of your branches and tags. And while we’ve used a standard for branches directory, our tags setup is a bit more complicated.

The problem was that we used tags every time we merged between branches. This meant that we ended up with a lot of tags with names like “merge_rev_1_10_5665” to indicate a merge from the “rev_1_10” branch into trunk at r5665. Plus we had tags for releases. So Marshall took it upon himself to reorganize the tags in the Subversion tree so that all release tags went into the “releases” subdirectory, and merges went into subdirectories named for the branch from which the merge derived. Those subdirectories went into the “merges” subdirectory. We ended up with a directory structure organized like this:

/tags/
  /releases/
    /1.10.1/
    /1.10.2/
    /1.10.3/
  /merges/
    /dev_ajax/
      /trunk-7890
    /rev_1_10/
      /trunk-7043/
      /trunk-7194/
      /trunk-7300/

This was useful for keeping things organized in Subversion, so that we could easily find a tag for a previous merge in order to determine the revisions to specify for a new merge. But because older tags were moved from previous locations, and because newer tags were in subdirectories of the “tags” directory, git-svn did not identify them as tags. Well, that’s not really fair. It did identify earlier tags, before they were moved, but all the other tags were not found. Instead I ended up with tags in Git named tags/releases and tags/merges, which was useless. But even if all of our tags had been identified as tags, none had parent commit IDs, so there was no place to see where they actually came from.

So to rebuild the commit, release, and merge history from Subversion, I first created a local copy of the subversion repository using svnsync. Then I cloned it to Git like so:

SVNREPO=file:///Users/david/svn_bricolage_cc
git svn init $SVNREPO --stdlayout
git config svn.authorsfile /Users/david/bric_authors.txt
git svn fetch --no-follow-parent --revision 5517:HEAD

By starting with r5517, which was the first real commit to Subversion, I avoided the git-svn error I reported last week. In truth, though, I ended up running this clone many, many times. The first few times, I ran it with --no-metadata, as recommended in various HOWTOs. But then I kept getting errors such as:

git svn log
fatal: bad default revision 'refs/remotes/git-svn'
----------------------------------------------------

This was more than a little annoying, and it took me a day or so to realize that this was because I had been using --no-metadata. Once I killed off that option, things worked much better

Furthermore, by starting at r5517 and passing the --no-follow-parent option, git-svn ran much more quickly. Rather than taking 30 hours to get all revisions including stuff that had been moved around (and then failing), it now took around 90 minutes to do the export. Much more manageable, although I also started making backup copies and restoring from them as I experimented with fixing branches and tags. Ultimately, I ended up also passing the --ignore-paths option, to exclude various branches that were never really used or that I had already fetched in their entirety from CVS:

git svn fetch --no-follow-parent --revision 5517:HEAD \
--ignore-paths '(David|Kineticode|Release_|dev_(callback|(media_)?templates)|rev_1_([024]|[68]_temp)|tags/(Dev-|Release_|Start|help|mark|rel_1_([24567]|8_0)|rev_1_([26]|8_merge-2004-05-04)))|tmp'
svn2git --no-clone

The call to svn2git converts remote branches to local tags and branches. Now I had a reasonably clean copy of the repository (aside from the 120 or so commits from when Marshall did the tags reorganization) for me to work with. I opened it up with GitX and started scripting out merges.

To assist in this, I took a hint from Ask Bjørn Hansen, sent in email in response to a Tweet, and tagged every single commit with its corresponding Subversion revision number, like so (in Perl):

for my $c (`git rev-list --all --date-order --timestamp | sort -n | awk '{print \$2}'`) {
    chomp $c;
    my ($svnid) = `git show -s $c | tail -1` =~ /[@](\d+)\s+/;
    system qw(git tag -f), $svnid, $c;
}

The nice thing about this is that it made it easy for me to scan through the commits in GitX and see where things were. It also meant that I could reference these tags when I wrote the code to manage the merges. So what I did was sort the commits in reverse chronological order, and then search for those with the word “merge” in their subjects. When one was clearly for a merge (as opposed to simply using the word “merge”), I would disable the search, scroll through the commits until I found the selected commit, and then look for a likely prior commit that it merged from.

This was a bit of pain in the ass, because, unfortunately, GitX doesn’t keep the selected commit record in the middle of the screen when you cancel the search. Mail.app does this right: If I do a search, select a message, then cancel the search, the selected message is still in the middle of the screen. But with GitX, as I said, I have to scroll to find it. This wasn’t going to scale very well. So what I did instead was search for “merge”, then I took a screen shot of the results and cancelled the merge. Then I just opened the screenshot in Preview, looked at the records there, then found them in GitX. This made things go quite a bit faster.

As a result, I added a migration function to properly tag merges. It looked like this:

sub graft_merges {
    print "Grafting merges\n";
    # Handle the merges.
    for my $graft (
        [qw( trunk@5524   rev_1_8@5523 )],
        [qw( trunk@5614   rev_1_8@5613 )],
        [qw( rev_1_8@5591 trunk@5590   )],
    ) {
        my ($commit, $parent) = map { s/.+[@]//; $_ } @$graft;
        my $cmd = "\$(git rev-parse $commit) "
                . "\$(git rev-parse $commit^) "
                . "\$(git rev-parse $parent)";
        `echo "$cmd" >> .git/info/grafts`;
    }
}

By referencing revision tags explicitly, I was able to just use git rev-parse to look up SHA1 hash IDs to put into .git/info/grafts. This saved me the headache of dealing with very long IDs, but also allowed me to easily keep track of revision numbers and branches (the branch information is actually superfluous here, but I kept it for my sanity). So, basically, for [qw( trunk@5524 rev_1_8@5523 )], it ends up writing the SHA1 hashes for r5524, the existing parent commit for r5524 (that’s the $commit^ bit), and for the new parent, r5523. I ended up with 73 merges that needed to be properly recorded.

With the merges done, I next dove into branches. For some reason, git-svn failed to identify a parent commit for any branch. Maybe because I started with r5517? I have no idea. So I had to search through the commits to see when branches were started. I mainly did this by looking at the branches in ViewVC. By clicking each one, I was able to see the earliest commit, which usually had a name like “Created a branch for my SoC project.” I would then look up that commit in ViewVC, such as r7423, which started the “dev_ajax” branch, just to make sure that it was copied from trunk. Then I simply went into GitX, found r7423, then looked back to the last commit to trunk before r7423. That was the parent of the branch. With such data, I was able to write a function like this:

sub graft_branches {
    print "Grafting branches\n";
    for my $graft (
        [qw( dev_ajax@7423            trunk@7301 )],
        [qw( dev_mysql@7424           trunk@7301 )],
        [qw( dev_elem_occurrence@7427 trunk@7301 )],
    ) {
        my ($commit, $parent) = map { s/.+[@]//; $_ } @$graft;
        my $cmd = "\$(git rev-parse $commit) "
                . "\$(git rev-parse $parent)";
        `echo "$cmd" >> .git/info/grafts`;
    }
}

Here I only needed to look up the revision and its parent and write it to .git/info/grafts. Then all of my branches had parents. Or nearly all of them; those that were also in the old CVS repository will have to wait until the two are stitched together to find their parents.

Next I needed to get releases properly tagged. This was not unlike the merge tag work: I just had to find the proper revision and tag it. This time, I looked through the commits in GitX for those with “tag for” in their subjects because, conveniently, I nearly always used this phrase in a release tag, as in “Tag for the 1.8.11 release of Bricolage.” Then I just looked back from the tag commit to find the commit copied to the tag, and that commit would be tagged with the release tag. The function to create the tags looked like this:

sub tag_releases {
    print "Tagging releases\n";
    for my $spec (
        [ 'rev_1_8@5726' => 'v1.8.1'  ],
        [ 'rev_1_8@5922' => 'v1.8.2'  ],
        [ 'rev_1_8@6073' => 'v1.8.3'  ],
    ) {
        my ($where, $tag) = @{$spec};
        my ($branch, $rev) = split /[@]/, $where;
        my $tag_date = `git show --pretty=format:%cd -s $rev`;
        chomp $tag_date;
        local $ENV{GIT_COMMITTER_DATE} = $tag_date;
        system qw(git tag -fa), $tag, '-m', "Tag for $tag release of Bricolage.", $rev;
    }
}

I am again indebted to Ask for the code here, especially to set the date for the tag.

Since I had created new release tags and recreated the merge history in Git, I no longer needed the old tags from Subversion, so next I rewrote the --ignore-paths option to exclude all of the tags directories, as well as some branches that were never used:

SVNREPO=file:///Users/david/svn_bricolage_cc
git svn init $SVNREPO --stdlayout
git config svn.authorsfile /Users/david/bric_authors.txt
git svn fetch --no-follow-parent --revision 5517:HEAD
git svn fetch --no-follow-parent --revision 5517:HEAD \
--ignore-paths '(David|Kineticode|Release_|dev_(callback|(media_)?templates)|rev_1_([024]|[68]_temp)|tags/)|tmp';

With this in hand, I killed off the call to svn2git, opting to convert trunk and the remote branches myself (easily done by copying-and-pasting the relevant Perl code). Then all I needed to do was clean up the extant tags and run git-filter-branch to make the grafts permanent:

sub finish {
    print "Deleting old tags\n";
    my @tags = grep m{^tags/}, map { s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; $_ } `git branch -a`;
    system qw(git branch -r -D), $_ for @tags;

    print "Deleting revision tags\n";
    @tags_to_delete = grep { /^\d+$/ } map { s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//; $_ } `git tag`;
    system qw(git tag -d), $_ for @tags_to_delete;

    print "Grafting...\n";
    system qw(git filter-branch);
    system qw(git gc);
}

And now I have a nicely organized Git repository based on the Bricolage Subversion repository, with all (or most) merges in their proper places, release tags, and branch tracking. Now all I have to do is stitch it together with the repository based on CVS and I’ll be ready to put this sucker on GitHub! More on that in my next post.

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Following a discussion on the Bricolage developers mail list, I started down the path last week of migrating the Bricolage Subversion repository to Git. This turned out to be much more work than I expected, but to the benefit of the project, I think. Since I had a lot of questions about how to do certain things and how Git thinks about certain things, I wanted to record what I worked out here over the course of a few entries. Maybe it will help you manage your migration to Git.

The first thing I tried to do was use git-svn to migrate Bricolage to Git. I pointed it to the root directory and let it rip. I immediately saw that it noticed that the root was originally at the root of the repository, rather than the “bricolage” subdirectory, and so followed that path and started pulling stuff down. In a separate terminal window, I was watching the branches build up, and there were a lot of them, many named like:

David
David@5248
David@584
tags/Release_1_2_1
tags/Release_1_2_1@5249
tags/Release_1_2_1@577

Although many of those branches and tags hadn’t been used since the beginning of time, and certainly not since Bricolage was moved to Subversion from its original home in SourceForge CVS, because Subversion has no real concept of branches or tags, git-svn was duly copying them all, including the separate histories for each. Yow.

I could have dealt with that, renaming things, deleting others, and grafting where appropriate (more on grafting in a minute), but then I got this error from git-svn:

bricolage/branches/rev_1_8/lib/Bric/App/ApacheConfig.pm was not
found in commit e5145931069a511e98a087d4cb1a8bb75f43f899 (r5256)

This was annoying, especially since the file clearly does exist in that commit:

svn list -r5256 http://svn.bricolage.cc/bricolage/branches/rev_1_8/lib/Bric/App/ApacheConfig.pm
ApacheConfig.pm

I posted to the Git mail list about this issue, but unfortunately got no reply. Given that it was taking around 30 hours(!) to get to that point (and about 18 hours once I started using a local copy of the Subversion repository, thank to a suggestion from Ask Bjørn Hansen), I started thinking about how to simplify things a bit.

Since most of the moving stuff around happened immediately after the move to Subversion, and before we started committing working code to the repository, it occurred to me that I could probably go back to the original Bricolage CVS Repository on SourceForge, migrate that to Git, and then just migrate from Subversion starting from the first real commit there. Then I could just stitch the two repositories together.

From CVS to Git

Thanks to advice from IRC, I used cvs2git to build a repository from a dump from CVS. Apparently, git cvsimport makes a lot of mistakes, while cvs2git does a decent job keeping branches and tags where they should be. It’s also pretty fast; once I set up its configuration and ran it, it took only around 5 minutes for it to build import files for git fast-import. It also has some nice features to rename symbols (tags), ignore tags, assign authors, etc. I’m aware of not tool to migrate Subversion to Git that does the same thing.

Once I had my dump, I started writing a script to import it into Git. The basic import looks like this:

GITREPO=/Users/david/Desktop/git_from_cvs
rm -rf $GITREPO
mkdir $GITREPO
chdir $GITREPO
git init
cat ../cvs2svn-tmp/git-blob.dat ../cvs2svn-tmp/git-dump.dat | git fast-import
svn2git --no-clone
git gc
git reset --hard

I used svn2git to convert remote branches to local tags and branches The --no-clone option is what keeps it from doing the Subversion stuff; everything else is the same for a new conversion from CVS. I also had to run git reset --hard to throw out uncommitted local changes. What changes? I’m not sure where they came from, but after the last commit is imported from CVS, all of the local files in the master branch are deleted, but that change is not committed. Strange, but by doing a hard reset, I reverted that change with no harm done.

Next, I started looking at the repository in GitX, which provides a decent graphical interface for browsing around a Git repository on Mac OS X. There I discovered that a major benefit to importing from CVS rather than Subversion is that, because CVS has real tags, those tags are properly migrated to Git. What this means is that, because the Bricolage project (nearly) always tagged merges between branches and included the name of the appropriate tag name in a merge commit message, I was able to reconstruct the merge history in Git.

For example, there were a lot of tags named like so:

% git tag
rev_1_8_merge-2004-05-04
rev_1_6_merge-2004-05-02
rev_1_6_merge-2004-04-10
rev_1_6_merge-2004-04-09
rev_1_6_merge-2004-03-16

So if I wanted to find the merge commit that corresponded to that first tag, all I had to do was sort the commits in GitX by date and look near 2004-05-04 for a commit message that said something like:

Merge from rev_1_8. Will tag that branch "rev_1_8_merge-2004-05-04".

That commit’s SHA key is “b786ad1c0eeb9df827d658a81dc2d32ec6108e92”. Its parent’s SHA key is “11dbbd49644aaa607bd83f8d542d37fcfbd5e63b”. So then all I had to do was to tell git that there is a second parent for that commit. Looking in GitX for the commit tagged “rev_1_8_merge-2004-05-04”, I found that its SHA key is “4fadb117a71a49add69950eccc14b77a04c8ec68”. So to assign that as a second parent, I write a line to the file .git/info/grafts that describes its parentage:

b786ad1c0eeb9df827d658a81dc2d32ec6108e92 11dbbd49644aaa607bd83f8d542d37fcfbd5e63b 4fadb117a71a49add69950eccc14b77a04c8ec68

Once I had all the grafts written, I just ran git filter-branch and they were permanently rewritten to the new hierarchy.

And that’s it! The parentage is now correct. It was a lot of busy work to create the mapping between tags and merges, but it’s nice to have it all done and properly mapped out historically in Git. I even found a bunch merges with no corresponding tags and figured out the proper commit to link them up to (though I stopped when I got back to 2002 and things get really confusing). And now, because the merge relationships are now properly recorded in Git, I can drop those old merge tags: as workarounds for a lack of merge tracking in CVS, they are no longer necessary in Git.

Next up, how I completed the merge from Subversion. I’ll write that once I’ve finally got it nailed down. Unfortunately, it takes an hour or two to export from Subversion to Git, and I’m having to do it over and over again as I figure stuff out. But it will be done, and you’ll hear more about it here.

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In preparation for migrating a large Subversion repository to GitHub, I needed to get a list of all of the Subversion committers throughout history, so that I could create a file mapping them to Git users. Here’s how I did it:

svn log --quiet http://svn.example.com/ \
| grep '^r' | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq > committers.txt

Now I just have edit committers.txt and I have my mapping file.

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This week, I imported pgTAP into GitHub. It took me a day or so to wrap my brain around how it’s all supposed to work, with generous help from Tekkub. But I’m starting to get the hang of it, and I like it. By the end of the day, I had sent push requests to Test::More and Blosxom Plugins. I’m well on my way to being hooked.

One of the things I want, however, is SVN::Notify-type commit emails. I know that there are feeds, but they don’t have diffs, and for however much I like using NetNewsWire to feed by political news addiction, it never worked for me for commit activity. And besides, why download the whole damn thing again, diffs and all (assuming that ever happens), for every refresh. Seems like a hell of a lot unnecessary network activity—not to mention actual CPU cycles.

So I would need a decent notification application. I happen to have one. I originally wrote SVN::Notify after I had already written activitymail, which sends noticies for CVS commits. SVN::Notify has changed a lot over the years, and now it’s looking a bit daunting to consider porting it to Git.

However, just to start thinking about it, SVN::Notify really does several different things:

• Fetches relevant information about a Subversion event.
• Parses that information for a number of different outputs.
• Writes the event information into one or more outputs (currently plain text or XHTML).
• Constructs an email message from the outputs
• Sends the email message via a specified method (sendmail or SMTP).

For the initial implementation of SVN::Notify, this made a lot of sense, because it was doing something fairly simple. It was designed to be extensible by subclassing (successfully done by SVN::Notify::Config and SVN::Notify::Mirror), and, later, by output filters, and that was about it.

But as I think about moving stuff to Git, and consider the weaknesses of extensibility by subclassing (it’s just not pretty), I’m naturally rethinking this architecture. I wouldn’t want to have to do it all over again should some future SCM system come along in the future. So, following from a private exchange with Martijn Van Beers, I have some preliminary thoughts on how a hypothetical SCM::Notify (VCS::Notify?) module might be constructed:

• A single interface for fetching SCM activity information. There could be any number of implementations, just as long as they all provided the same interface. There would be a class for fetching information from Subversion, one for Git, one for CVS, etc.
• A single interface for writing a report for a given transaction. Again, there could be any number of implementations, but all would have the same interface: taking an SCM module and writing output to a file handle.
• A single interface for doing something with one or more outputs. Again, they can do things as varied as simply writing files to disk, appending to a feed, inserting into a database, or, of course, sending an email.
• The core module would process command-line arguments to determine what SCM is being used any necessary contextual information and just pass it on to the appropriate classes.

In psedudo-code, what I’m thinking is something like this:

package SCM::Notify;

sub run {
    my $args = shift->getopt;
    my $scm  = SCM::Interface->new(
        scm      => $args->{scm} # e.g., "SVN" or "Git", etc.
        revision => $args->{revision},
        context  => $args->{context} # Might include repository path for SVN.
    );

    my $report = SCM::Report->new(
        method => $opts->{method}, # e.g., SMTP, sendmail, Atom, etc.
        scm    => $scm,
        format => $args->{output}, # text, html, both, etc.
        params => $args->{params}, # to, from, subject, etc.
    );

    $report->send;
}

Then a report class just has to create report in the specified format or formats and do something with them. For example, a Sendmail report would put together a report as a multipart message with each format in a single part, and then deliver it via /sbin/sendmail, something like this:

package SCM::Report::Sendmail;

sub send {
    my $self = shift;
    my $fh = $self->fh;
    for my $format ( $self->formats ) {
        print $fh SCM::Format->new(
            format => $format,
            scm    => $self->scm,
        );
    }

    $self->deliver;
}

So those are my rather preliminary thoughts. I think it’d actually be pretty easy to port the logic of this stuff over from SVN::Notify; what needs some more thought is what the command-line interface might look like and how options are passed to the various classes, since the Sendmail report class will require different parameters than the SMTP report class or the Atom report class. But once that’s worked out in a way that can be handled neutrally, we’ll have a much more extensible implementation that will be easy to add on to going forward.

Any suggestions for passing different parameters to different classes in a single interface? Everything needs to be able to be handled via command-line options and not be ugly or difficult to use.

So, you wanna work on this? :-)

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I successfully migrated the Kineticode Subversion repository to a new server yesterday. Everything works great. But after my first commit, I realized that, while my username on the old server was “theory,” on the new server it’s “david”. Subversion works fine, of course, and I was able to start committing from old checkouts using the new username, but I realized that sites like Ohloh would pick up the two usernames as separate usernames. So I wanted to update all of the 3630 existing revisions that were mine to use the new username.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much on how to do this in a quick Googling. But I quickly figured out that what I need to do was to svnadmin dump my repository, modify the dump, and then load it again. The Subversion dump format has all these fields for tracking the content-lengths of various, so doing the update was a bit tricky. But I wrote the script here to track things, and it worked great for me. So here it is for others to reference and use.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>) {
    print;
    next unless /^Revision-number:\s+\d+$/;

    # Grab the content lengths. Examples:
    # Prop-content-length: 139
    # Content-length: 139
    my $plen_line = <>;
    my $clen_line = <>;

    unless ( $plen_line =~ /^Prop-content-length:\s+\d+$/ ) {
        # Nothing we want to change.
        print $plen_line, $clen_line;
        next;
    }

    my @lines;
    while ( <> ) {
        if ( /^PROPS-END$/ ) {
            # finish.
            print $plen_line, $clen_line, @lines, $_;
            last;
        }

        push @lines, $_;

        if ( /^svn:author$/ ) {
            # Grab the author content length. Example:
            # V 6
            my $alen_line = <>;

            # Grab the author name.
            my $auth = <>;

            if ( $auth =~ s/^theory$/david/ ) {
                # Adjust the content lengths.
                for my $line ( $plen_line, $clen_line, $alen_line ) {
                    $line =~ s/(\d+)$/$1 - 1/e;
                }
            }
            print $plen_line, $clen_line, @lines, $alen_line, $auth;
            last;
        }
    }
}

To use it, save it to a file, say svn_author, then change line 40 to your old and new usernames. Then, on line 43, change the $1 - 1 bit to be correct for the difference between the usernames you’re changing. For example, if you’re changing your username from, say, “shane” to “chromatic,” the new name is five characters longer, so you’d make it $1 + 5.

Now, run it like so:

svnadmin dump /path/to/svnroot > svndump.out
perl svn_author svndump.out > svndump.in
svnadmin create /path/to/new/svnroot
svnadmin load /path/to/new/svnroot < svndump.in

And that’s it! Feel free to take this code and do with it what you like, including fix any bugs, add command-line options, support changing multiple authors at once, or whatever. Share and enjoy.

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I’m very pleased to announce the release of SVN::Notify 2.70. You can see an example of its colordiff output here. This is a major release that I’ve spent the last several weeks polishing and tweaking to get just right. There are quite a few changes, but the two most important are improved character encoding support and output filtering.

Improved Character Encoding Support

I’ve had a number of bug reports regarding issues with character encodings. Particularly for folks working in Europe and Asia, but really for anyone using multibyte characters in their source code and log messages (and we all do nowadays, don’t we?), it has been difficult to find the proper incantation to get SVN::Notify to convert data from and to their proper encodings. Using a patch from Toshikazu Kinkoh as a starting-point, and with a lot of reading and experimentation, as well as regular and patient tests on Toshikazu’s and Martin Lindhe’s production systems, I think I’ve finally got it nailed down.

Now you can use the --encoding (formerly --charset), --svn-encoding, and --diff-encoding options—as well as --language—to get SVN::Notify to do the right thing. As long as your Subversion server’s OS supports an appropriate locale, you should be golden (mine is old, with no UTF-8 locales :\). And if all else fails, you can still set the $LANG environment variable before executing svnnotify.

There is actually a fair bit to know about encodings to get it to work properly, but if you use UTF-8 throughout and your OS supports UTF-8 locales, you shouldn’t have to do anything. You might have to set --language in order to get it to use the proper locale. See the new documentation of the encoding support for all the details. And if you still have problems, please do let me know.

Output Filtering

Much sexier is the addition of output filtering in SVN::Notify 2.70. I got pretty tired of getting feature requests for what are essentially formatting modifications, such as this one requesting support for KDE-style keyword support. I myself was using Trac wiki syntax in commit messages on a recent project and wanted to see them converted to HTML for messages output by SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff.

So I finally sat down and gave some though on how to implement a simple plugin architecture for SVN::Notify. When I realized that it was generally just formatting that people wanted, it became simpler: I just needed a way to allow folks to write simple output filters. The solution I came up with was to just use Perl. Output filters are simply subroutines named for the kind of output they filter. They live in perl packages. That’s it.

For example, say that your developers write their commit log messages in Textile, and rather than receive them stuck inside <pre> tags, you’d like them converted to HTML. It’s simple. Just put this code in a Perl module file:

package SVN::Notify::Filter::Textile;
use Text::Textile ();

sub log_message {
    my ($notifier, $lines) = @_;
    return $lines unless $notify->content_type eq 'text/html';
    return [ Text::Textile->new->process( join $/, @$lines ) ];
}

Put the file, SVN/Notify/Filter/Textile.pm somewhere in a Perl library directory. Then use the new --filter option to svnnotify to put it to work:

svnnotify -p "$1" -r "$2" --handler HTML::ColorDiff --filter Textile

Yep, that’s it! SVN::Notify will find the filter module, load it, register its filtering subroutine, and then call it at the appropriate time. Of course, there are a lot of things you can filter; consult the complete documentation for all of the details. But hopefully this gives you a flavor for how easy it is to write new filters for SVN::Notify. I’m hoping that all those folks who want features can now stop bugging me and writing their own filters to do the job, and uploading them to CPAN for all to share!

To get things started, I scratched my own itch, writing a Trac filter myself. The filter is almost as simple as the Textile example above, but I also spent quite a bit of time tweaking the CSS so that most of the Trac-generated HTML looks good. You can see an example right here. Thanks to a number of bug fixes in Text::Trac, as well as Trac-specific CSS added via a filter on CSS output, it works beautifully. If I’m feeling motivated in the next week or so, I’ll create a separate CPAN distribution with just a Markdown filter and upload it. That will create a nice distribution example for folks to copy to create their own. Or maybe someone on the Lazy Web Will do it for me! Maybe you?

I wish I’d thought to do this from the beginning; it would have saved me from having to add so many features/cruft to SVN::Notify over the years. Here’s a quick list of the features that likely could have been implemented via filters instead of added to the core:

• --user-domain: Combine the SVN username with a domain for the “From” header.
• --add-header: Add a header to the message.
• --reply-to: Add a specific header to the message.
• SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff: Frankly, looking back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t just put this support right into SVN::Notify::HTML. But even if I hadn’t, it could have been implemented via filters.
• --subject-prefix:: Modify the message subject.
• --subject-cx: Add the commit context to the subject.
• --strip-cx-regex: More subject context modification.
• --no-first-line: Another subject filter.
• --max-sub-length: Yet another!
• --max-diff-length: A filter could truncate the diff, although this might be tricky with the HTML formatting.
• --author-url: Modify the metadata section to add a link to the author URL.
• --revision-url: Ditto for the revision URL.
• --ticket-map: Filter the log message for various ticketing system strings to convert to URLs. This also encompasses the old --rt-url, --bugzilla-url, --gnats-url, and --jira-url options.
• --header: Filter the beginning of the message.
• --footer: Filter the end of the message.
• --linkize: Filter the log message to convert URLs to links for HTML messages.
• --css-url: Filter the CSS to modify it, or filter the start of the HTML to add a link to an external CSS URL.
• --wrap-log: Reformat the log message for HTML.

Yes, really! That’s about half the functionality right there. I’m glad that I won’t have to add any more like that; filters are a much better way to go.

So download it, install it, write some filters, get your multibyte characters output properly, and enjoy! And as usual, send me your bug reports, but implement your own improvements using filters!

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So I finally got ‘round to porting SVN::Notify to Windows. Version 2.57 is making is way to CPAN right now. The solution turned out to be dead simple: I just had to use a different form of piping open() on Windows, i.e., open FH, "$cmd|" instead of open FH, "-|"; exec($cmd);. It’s silly, really, but it works. It really makes me wonder why -| and |- haven’t been emulated on Windows. Whatever.

‘Course the other thing I realized, after I made this change and all the tests pass, was that there is no equivalent of sendmail on Windows. So I added the --smtp option, so that now email can be sent to an SMTP server rather than to a local sendmail. I tested it out, and it seems to work, but I’d be especially interested to hear from folks using wide characters in their repositories: do they get printed properly to Net::SMTP’s connection?

The whole list of changes in 2.57 (the output remains the same as in 2.56):

• Finally ported to Win32. It was actually a simple matter of changing how command pipes are created.
• Added --smtp option to enable sending messages to an SMTP server rather than to the local sendmail application. This is essential for Windows support.
• Added --io-layer to the usage statement in svnnotify.
• Fixed single-dash arguments in documentation so that they’re all documented with a single dash in SVN::Notify.

Enjoy!

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I’ve just uploaded SVN::Notify 2.56 to CPAN. Check a mirror near you! There have been a lot of changes since I last posted about SVN::Notify (for the 2.50 release), not least of which is that SourceForge has standardized on it for their Subversion roll out. W00t! The result was a couple of patches from SourceForge’s David Burley to add headers and footers and to truncate diffs over a certain size. See the sample output for how it looks. Thanks, David!

The change I’m most pleased with in 2.56 is the addition of SVN::Notify::Alternative, based on a submission from Jukka Zitting. This new subclass allows you to actually combine a number of other subclasses into a single activity notification message. Why? Well, mainly because, though you might like to get HTML messages with colorized diffs, some mail clients might not care for the HTML. They would much prefer the plain text version.

SVN::Notify::Alternative allows you to have your cake and eat it too: send a single message with multipart/alternative sections for both HTML output and plain text. Plain text will always be used; to use HTML::ColorDiff with it, just do this:

svnnotify --repos-path "$1" --revision "$2" \
  --to developers@example.com --handler Alternative \
  --alternative HTML::ColorDiff --with-diff

This incantation will send an email with both the plain text and HTML::ColorDiff formats. If you look at it in Mail.app, you’ll see the nice colorized format, and if you look at it in pine, you’ll see the plain text.

For the curious, here are all of the changes since 2.50:

2.56 2006-04-04T23:16:37

• Abstracted creation of the diff file handle into the new diff_handle() method.
• Documented use of diff_handle() in the output() method.
• Added optional second argument to output() to optionally suppress the output of the email headers. This argument is used by the new Alternative subclass.
• Added SVN::Notify::Alternative, which allows multiple versions of a commit email to be sent, such as text/plain plus HTML. The multiple versions are assembled into a single email message using the multipart/alternative media type. For those who want HTML messages but must support users that can only read plain text or rely on archives that ignore HTML messages, this can be very useful. Based on an implementation by Jukka Zitting.
• Fixed use_ok() tests that weren’t running at all.
• Added an extra newline to separate the file list from an inline diff in the plain text format where --with-diff has been specified.
• Moved the multipart/mixed content-type header generation from output_headers() to output_content_type(), not only because this makes more sense, but also because it makes attachments behave better when using SVN::Notify::Alternative.
• Documented accessors in SVN::Notify::HTML.

2.55 2006-04-03T23:11:11

• Added the io-layer option to specify an alternate IO layer. Will be most useful for those with repositories containing text in multiple encodings, where it should be set to “raw”.
• Fixed the context output in the subject for the --subject-cx option so that it’s smarter about determining the longest common path. Reported by Max Horn.
• No longer modifying the values of the to_regex_map hash, so as not to mess with folks who might be passing it as a hash to more than one call to new(). Reported by Darby Felton.
• Added a meta http-equiv="content-type" tag to HTML output that includes the character set to help some clients in the proper display of the characters in an HTML email. I’m not sure if any clients actually need this help, but it certainly can’t hurt!
• Added the --css-url option to specify an alternate style sheet for HTML emails. SVN::Notify::HTML’s own CSS is left in the email, as well, so the specified style sheet can just override the default, rather than have to style everything itself. Yes, it takes advantage of the “cascading” feature of cascading style sheets! Based on a suggestion by Steve James.

2.54 2006-03-06T00:33:42

• Added /usr/bin to the list of paths searched for executables. Suggested by Nacho Barrientos.
• Added --max-diff-length option. Patch from David Burley/SourceForge.

2.53 2006-02-24T21:30:48

• Added header and footer attributes and command-line options to specify text to be put at the head and foot of each message. For HTML messages, the text will be escaped, unless it starts with “<”, in which case it will be assumed to be valid HTML and will therefore not be escaped. Either way, it will be output between <div> tags with the IDs “header” or “footer” as appropriate. Based on a patch from David Burley/SourceForge.
• Fixed the executable-searching algorithm added in 2.52 to add “.exe” to the name of the executable being searched for if $^O eq 'MSWin32'.
• Fixed encoding issues so that, under Perl 5.8 and later, the IO layer is set on file handles so as to encode input and decode output in the character set specified by the charset attribute. CPAN # 16050, reported by Michael Zehrer.
• Added a second argument to all calls to encode_entities() in SVN::Notify::HTML and SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff so that only ‘>’. ‘<’, ‘&’, and ‘"’ are escaped.
• Fixed a bug in the _find_exe() function that was attempting to modify a constant variable. Patch from John Peacock.
• Turned the _find_exe() function into the find_exe() class method, since subclasses (such as SVN::Notify::Mirror) might want to use it.

2.52 2006-02-19T18:50:24

• Now uses File::Spec->path to search for a validate sendmail or svnlook when they’re not specified via their respective command-line options or environment variables. Suggested by Andreas Koenig. Not that they should probably be explicitly set anyway, as the $PATH environment variable tends to be non-existent when running under Apache.

2.51 2006-01-02T23:28:11

• Fixed ColorDiff HTML to once again be valid XHTML 1.1.

Enjoy!

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So SVN::Notify doesn’t currently run on Windows. Why not? Well, because I wanted to do things as “rightly” as possible. In terms of efficiency, what that meant was, rather than slurping in whole chunks of data, such as diffs, from svnlook, I instead follows the guidance in perlipc to open a file handle pipe to svnlook and then read from it line-by-line. The method I wrote to create the pipe looks like this:

sub _pipe {
    my ($self, $mode) = (shift, shift);
    # Safer version of backtick (see perlipc(1)).
    local *PIPE;
    my $pid = open(PIPE, $mode);
    die "Cannot fork: $!\n" unless defined $pid;

    if ($pid) {
        # Parent process. Return the file handle.
        return *PIPE;
    } else {
        # Child process. Execute the commands.
        exec(@_) or die "Cannot exec $_[0]: $!\n";
        # Not reached.
    }
}

The problem is that it doesn’t work on Windows. perlipc says:

Note that these operations are full Unix forks, which means they may not be correctly implemented on alien systems. Additionally, these are not true multithreading. If you’d like to learn more about threading, see the modules file mentioned below in the SEE ALSO section.

‘Course, the SEE ALSO section doesn’t have much of for “alien systems,” but I have a comment in my code that suggests that Win32::Process might do for Windows compatibility. But I honestly don’t know.

So what’s the best approach for me to port SVN::Notify to Windows while keeping file handle pipes around for efficiency? Anyone care to take a stab at it, with tests for Winows, and send me a patch?

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SVN::Notify 2.50 is currently making its way to CPAN. It has quite a number of changes since I last wrote about it here, most significantly the slick new CSS treatment introduced in 2.47, provided by Bill Lynch. I really like the look, much better than it was before. Have a look at the SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff output to see what I mean. Be sure to make your browser window rally narrow to see how all of the sections automatically get a nice horizontal scrollbar when they’re wider than the window. Neat, eh? Check out the 2.40 output for contrast.

Here are all of the changes since the last version:

2.50 2005-11-10T23:27:22

• Added --ticket-url and --ticket-regex options to be used by those who want to match ticket identifers for systems other than RT, Bugzilla, GNATS, and JIRA. Based on a patch from Andrew O’Brien.
• Removed bogus use lib line put into Makefile.PL by a prerelease version of Module::Build.
• Fixed HTML tests to match either “’” or “&#39;”, since HTML::Entities can be configured differently on different systems.

2.49 2005-09-29T17:26:14

• Now require Getopt::Long 2.34 so that the --to-regex-map option works correctly when it is used only once on the command-line.

2.48 2005-09-06T19:14:35

• Swiched from <span class="add"> and <span class="rem"> to <ins> and <del> elements in SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff in order to make the markup more semantic.

2.47 2005-09-03T18:54:43

• Fixed options tests to work correctly with older versions of Getopt::Long. Reported by Craig McElroy.
• Slick new CSS treatment used for the HTML and HTML::ColorDiff emails. Based on a patch from Bill Lynch.
• Added --svnweb-url option. Based on a patch from Ricardo Signes.

2.46 2005-05-05T05:22:54

• Added support for “Copied” files to HTML::ColorDiff so that they display properly.

2.45 2005-05-04T20:38:18

• Added support for links to the GNATS bug tracking system. Patch from Nathan Walp.

2.44 2005-03-18T06:10:01

• Fixed Name in POD so that SVN::Notify’s POD gets indexed by search.cpan.org. Reported by Ricardo Signes.

2.43 2004-11-24T18:49:40

• Added --strip-cx-regex option to strip out parts of the context from the subject. Useful for removing parts of the file names you might not be interested in seeing in every commit message.
• Added --no-first-line option to omit the first sentence or line of the log message from the subject. Useful in combination with the --subject-cx option.

2.42 2004-11-19T18:47:20

• Changed “Files” to “Paths” in hash returned by file_label_map() since directories can be listed as well as files.
• Fixed SVN::Notify::HTML so that directories listed among the changed paths are not links.
• Requiring Module::Build 0.26 to make sure that the installation works properly. Reported by Robert Spier.

Enjoy!

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I expect that this will be my last release of SVN::Notify for a while. I’ve already spent more time on it than I had anticipated. But anyway, this is a pretty solid release. It doesn’t change the API or anything, but I feel that the jump from 2.30 to 2.40 is justified because of the sheer number of changes. From now on, I expect that it will mostly be maintenance, like 2.41, which fixes a minor formatting bug. Grab it now from CPAN.

First, I’ve added a new, complex example of the SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff output that I will keep up-to-date with all future changes. This will allow people to get a better idea of what it’s capable of than my previous contrived examples allowed.

The biggest change is that I’ve moved the Request Tracker, Bugzilla, and JIRA support from SVN::Notify::HTML to SVN::Notify. I realized, after the release of 2.30, that it might be cool to add links to the text-only email message generated by SVN::Notify, too. So I’ve done that, including for ViewCVS links. Unlike in SVN::Notify::HTML, the links won’t be inline in the message (that doesn’t work too well in plain text, IMO), but will come in their own sections after the message. So you’ll get something like this (extreme example):

Log Message:
-----------
Let's try a few links to other applications. First, we have
A Bugzilla Bug # 709. Then we have a JIRA key, TST-1608. And
finally, we have an RT link to Ticket # 4321.

Hey, we could add one to ViewCVS for a Subversion Revision
#606, too!

ViewCVS Links:
-------------
    http://viewsvn.bricolage.cc/?rev=606&view=rev

Bugzilla Links:
--------------
    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=709

RT Links:
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    http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?id=4321

JIRA Links:
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    http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/ViewIssue.jspa?key=TST-1608

The nice thing is that, for many mail clients, these will be turned into clickable links. You’ll also notice that the text that creates the ViewCVS link is split over two lines. This is new in this release, and works for SVN::Notify::HTML, too. I made a few other tweaks to the regular expressions, as well. Here’s a complete list of changes:

• Fixed accessor generation so that accessors created for the attributes passed to register_attributes() but a subclass are created in the subclass’ package instead of in SVN::Notify.
• Changed parsing for JIRA keys to use any set of capital letters followed by a dash and then a number, rather than the literal string “JIRA-” followed by a number. Reported by Garrett Rooney.
• Modified the regular expression patterns for the RT, Bugzilla, RT, and ViewCVS links to properly match on word boundaries, so that strings like “humbug 12” don’t match.
• Modified the ViewCVS link regular expression pattern so that it matches strings like “rev 12” as well as “revision 12”.
• Modified the RT link regular expression pattern so that it matches strings like “RT-Ticket: 23” as well as “Ticket 1234”. Suggested by Jesse Vincent.
• Added complicated example to try to show off all of the major features. I will keep this up-to-date going forward in order to post sample output on the Web.
• Fixed the parsing of log messages so that empty lines are no longer eliminated.
• HTML::ColorDiff now properly handles the listing of binary files in the diff, marking them with a new class, “binary”, and using the same CSS as is used for the “propset” class.
• In HTML::ColorDiff, Fixed CSS for the “delfile” class to properly wrap it in a border like the other files in the diff.
• Added labels to the HTML::ColorDiff diff file sections to indicate the type of change (“Modified”, “Added”, “Deleted”, or “Property changes”).
• Moved the rt_url, bugzilla_url, and jira_url parameters from SVN::Notify::HTML to SVN::Notify, where they are used to add URLs to the text version of log messages.

Enjoy!

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I released a new version of SVN::Notify last night, 2.30. This new version has a few things going for it.

First, and most obviously from the point of view of users of the HTML subclass, I’ve added new options for specifying Request Tracker, Bugzilla, and JIRA URLs. The --rt-url, --bugzilla-url, and --jira-url options have an effect much like the parallel feature in CVSspam: pass in a string with the spot for the ID represented by %s, such as http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?id=%s for RT or http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s for Bugzilla. SVN::Notify::HTML will then look for the appropriate strings (such as “Ticket # 1234” for RT or “Bug # 4321” for Bugzilla) and turn them into URLs.

This functionality has been extended to the old --viewcvs-url option, to. For the sake of consistency, it now also requires a URL of the same form (although if SVN::Notify doesn’t see %s in the string, it will append a default and emit a warning), and will be used to create links for strings like “Revision 654” in the log message.

SVN::Notify::HTML has an additional new option, --linkize, that will force any email addresses or URLs it finds in the log message to be turned into links. Again, this works like it does for CVSspam; I’m grateful to Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition for the excellent regular expressions for matching URLs and email addresses.

All of this was made possible by moving the processing of options from svnnotify to SVN::Notify->get_options and adding a new class method, SVN::Notify->register_attributes. This second method allows Bricolage subclasses to easily add new attributes; register_attributes() will create accessor methods and add command-line option processing for each new attribute required by a subclass. Then, when you execute svnnotify --handler HTML, SVN::Notify->get_options processes the default options, loads the SVN::Notify::Handler subclass, and then processes any options specified by the subclass. The short story is that all of this is the detail-oriented way of saying that it is easier to subclass SVN::Notify and be able to automatically load the necessary options and attributes via the same executable, svnnotify.

This change was motivated not only by my desire to add the new features to SVN::Notify::HTML, but also by Autrijus’ new modules, SVN::Notify::Snapshot and SVN::Notify::Config. Thanks Autrijus!

I’ll try to get a nice example of all this functionality up in the next few days; if anyone else creates one first, send it to me! But in the meantime, enjoy!

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