Sending commit emails for Bazaar branches

One feature I’ve always found terribly useful for team maintained packages are commit emails. They help you know what’s going on without need for extra communication (eg. that somebody started packaging a new releases), and they are useful when there are new maintainers, because their work can be easily reviewed. Centralized version control systems like CVS or Subversion make possible and easy to have such messages sent automatically upon commit, so all fits nicely.

Enter distributed version control systems; particularly those like Bazaar that can push over dumb protocols like SFTP: it is not possible to have the server do something (send an email) when new revisions are commited. One has to resort to solutions like bzr-email, where each individual commiter configures a plugin to send out the email from their machines when they commit. The result IME is that, either nobody does that, or not everybody does. Either way, no cookie.

So I decided to bite the bullet here at DebConf, and write a tool to solve this problem: a program that monitors the branches in the machine where they are hosted, and sends emails for new revisions. The result is here. If you’d like to use it for an Alioth project, you just need to do:

  alioth% /var/lib/gforge/chroot/home/users/adeodato/bzr-hookless-email/alioth_helper.sh $PROJECT_NAME -d

(And ensure that the process does not die, or gets restarted when it does. I guess I could add code for that in the helper script, hm.)