Posted on by Olav Vitters

SVN-commits-list now show diffs

I’ve switched from the custom commit-email.pl script to the mailer.py from Subversion 1.4.6. Apart from one issue (svn.core.svn_path_canonicalize), it seems to work fine with Subversion 1.3.1. This time when I submitted the patches they actually appeared on upstream dev mailing list as well.

Anyway, as of now you’ll see the diffs of a commit right in the email as suggested by Gabriel Burt. It doesn’t diff .po files, nor deletions or binary files. A custom reply-to header can be set. Just email me if you want one (or svnmaster@gnome.org). The reply-to can be set per repository and it needs to be the development mailing list of the repository. By default the reply-to is empty (so you’ll mail the committer). Perhaps it should default to desktop-devel-list instead.

4 Replies to “SVN-commits-list now show diffs”

  1. I’m concerned what this will do to the amount (in size, not number of mails) sent to the list. Looking at the archive for svn-commits-list, the whole month as .gz can go up to 12MB; so uncompressed is probably at least 25MB. For a round figure, let’s assume 1MB max per day. Including the diffs will surely at least double this; possibly even more. So not downloading my mails just a few days could easily overflow my email account’s disk quota and lead to rejected mails.

    Why was this activated for all recipients of the existing svn-commits-list, instead of creating a new svn-commits-plus-diff-list for those who want to receive full diffs?

  2. chpe: I was concerned about that, so I asked for comments on gnome-infrastructure plus asked Gabriel to ask for comments on Planet GNOME (as gnome-infrastructure is pretty specific). Only after seeing only positive replies (also on IRC) I changed the config. If this isn’t wanted by subscribers, then the only option is turning it off. I’m not going to complicate our config any further.

    If you are concerned about the number of emails (or size), you can limit the number of emails you receive via the topics. That should be enough of a limitation IMO.

    What I would like is some limitation to limit the max diff size per file and in total. That should be pushed upstream as well.

  4. tko: No, it seems we only pass the number of lines in the diff, not the diff itself. This is the standard CIA bot script, so I don’t think CIA supports it.

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