Just a Theory

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Posts about Subversion

SVN::Notify 2.22 Improves Diff Parsing

I released SVN::Notify 2.22 last night. The new version fixes a few issues in the parsing of diffs in the HTML subclasses. SVN::Notify::HTML now properly identifies added, deleted, and property setting sections of an included diff file when creating IDs. The lists of the affected files near the top of the email links down into the diff, and now also includes links to the locations in the diff for files that have had only their properties changed.

SVN::Notify::HTML::ColorDiff had similar updates. It now properly outputs added and deleted files in the diff in separate sections, instead of grouping them under the last modified file listed. It also creates separate sections for files that have only had their properties changed. I’ve put an example here.

Grab the new version from CPAN now

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SVN::Notify 2.20 Adds Colorized Diffs

After getting prodded by Erik Hatcher, I went ahead and added another subclass to SVN::Notify. This one adds a pretty colorized diff to the message, instead of just the plain text one. See an example here. I’ve also added links from the lists of affected files into the diffs in the HTML and new HTML::ColorDiff layouts.

Enjoy!

Update: And now I’ve released SVN::Notify 2.21 with a few minor fixes, including XHTML 1.1 compliance.

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SVN::Notify 2.10 Generalizes Behavior

It’s all Autrijus’ fault.

As I mentioned last week when I released SVN::Notify 2.0, Autrijus has suggested using SVN::Notify as the base class for modules that do other things, such as send instant messages or update a checkout for backup purposes. Instantly seeing the value in this, I further realized that I could greatly simplify the support for HTML notification emails by moving the HTML-specific code to a subclass and then just let polymorphism do the work.

The result SVN::Notify 2.10. To simplify the move to a subclass for the HTML notifications, I broke up the old send() method into a large number of other methods that affect various parts of the composition of the email, such as headers, starting the message, outputting the log message, the file list, and outputting or attaching the diff. Then I just overrode the few methods that need different behavior in the subclass, and it all worked!

I realized, as I worked on it, I also realized that I was following the same principals that Ovid has written about with regard to the use of if. I was able to remove quite a few of them by moving HTML to a subclass. Of course, there are still some to enable diffs to be either included in an email or attached, but I didn’t want to split things up too much, or I’d have a geometric explosion of subclasses!

The svnnotify script, in the meantime, remains largely unmodified. The only change is the deprecation of the --format option in favor of a new option, --handler. Use this option to specify what subclass of SVN::Notify should handle the notification. So far, there’s just one, --format HTML, but I’m sure that Autrijus will soon add --format Jabber, and I’d like to add --format HTML::ColorDiff, myself. I might have to move the processing of command-line arguments out of svnnotify and into SVN::Notify, instead, so that subclasses can add new options. We’ll see what comes up.

Other changes to SVN::Notify include:

  • Added code to Build.PL to set the shebang line in the test scripts. Reported by Robert Spier.
  • Changed name of attached diff file to be named for the revision and the committer, rather than the committer and the date. Suggested by Robert Spier.
  • Added Author, Date, and Revision information to the top of each message.
  • The ViewCVS URL is no longer output for each file. A single link for the entire revision number is put at the top of the email, instead. ViewCVS Revision URL syntax pointed out by Peter Valdemar Morch.
  • Changed the send() method to execute() to better reflect its generalized use as the method that executes actions in response to Subversion activity.
  • The tests no longer require HTML::Entities to run. The HTML email tests will be skipped if it is not installed.
  • Added accessor methods for the attributes of SVN::Notify.

Enjoy!

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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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Perl.org Subversion Authentication Woes

It looks like the Perl.org authentication system that handles authentication for svn.bricolage.cc doesn’t properly cache an authentication token. Robert discovered this when a very large merge I was working on from the rev_1_8 branch of Bricolage to trunk was hanging and then timing out on me. The problem was that it was disconnecting from the MySQL server. Odd. At any rate, Robert switched over to an auth system that doesn’t use MySQL so that I could do the merge and then the commit. This morning, he restored the original auth system. I shouldn’t often have to do such a big merge or commit in Bricolage, so hopefully it won’t come up again, but it sure was annoying there for a while.

So for my fellow Bricolage developers who thought that the auth system was down: Sorry, it’s back now. And the trunk is fully updated with all of the changes to rev_1_8, which means that new development in the trunk can begin again in earnest.

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