Multi-project Subversion Commit Notification

I recently had to set up commit notification for a repository hosting multiple projects and thought I'd write up my experience here.

There are several ways to set up commit notification in subversion. Each involves the use of the post-commit hook. Here's how it works: After the subversion repository successfully commits a change, if it finds an executable file, /path/to/svn/hooks/post-commit, it will be invoked with two arguments. The first is the path to the repository, and the second is the revision number of the commit.

The content of post-commit can be whatever you want. In practice, most people make it a shell script that just invokes a utility like svnnotify to get things done.

Since the repository I was working on is hosting multiple projects (ala apache), each top-level project has it's own codewatch mailing list. I don't want to spam each project with every change to unrelated projects in the repository. So, based on arguments passed to post-commit, I had to start by determining which project the change was relevant to. I used the svnlook utility for this, like so:

# Get the first top-level directory changed by the commit
# Note: svnlook's dirs-changed output is multi-line, and
#       each line looks like "projname/trunk/etc"
PROJ=`/usr/bin/svnlook dirs-changed -r $2 $1|head -1|sed -e 's/\/.*//g'`

Once I had that information, the rest was straightforward. Here's the whole script.

Fedora Commons Repository - Lines of Code

We're wrapping up our last branches before the 3.0 final code freeze. I got curious last night about how the maintenance branch (2.2.x line) and the trunk (3.0 line) compared in terms of lines of code.

So I decided to pull up the archives of past releases and do a per-release comparison of everything under src/java/fedora. Here's what LocMetrics and Gnuplot told me:




It's hard to draw any definitive conclusions about the SLOC metric, but it's safe to say it's directly related to maintenance cost. And it's interesting to see how certain features / architectural changes affect it.

Installing Fedora in Two Minutes

Want to get a Fedora repository up and running as quickly as possible?

This screencast uses the installer's "quick" option to skip all the hard questions.


The "quick" option is useful if you've never installed Fedora before and just want to get acquainted. For more serious use, you'll want the "custom" option. And the installation guide :)