Re: [RFC] Add a new email notification script to "contrib"

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On 11/07/2012 10:47 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>> I'm curious as to whether you got around to this? I'd be interested in
>> updates on this script.
>
> Thanks for asking.  I have made many of the changes that were requested
> and/or I had planned:

I was playing around with it for some work repos last night.

> * Tentatively renamed the system to git-multimail
>
> * Store the configuration in namespace "multimailhook.*" instead of
> "hooks.*".

Great, I had made this change locally myself, makes it much easier to
keep the configuration separate, and I think doing and having a
migration script is better than using the original config variables.

> * Reinstated (optional) support for including shortlogs since the last
> tag in announce emails.
>
> * Script to migrate post-receive-email configuration to the equivalent
> git-multimail config.
>
> * Better documentation (including of the migration process).
>
> * Made it easier to use Python code to customize the script's behavior
> (by allowing it to be imported as a Python module), plus a demo script
> showing this usage.

That's very nice, I was monkeypatching the script to overwrite some
templates. This makes that easy.

> * Some primitive testing tools to generate a test git repository and
> generate many kinds of notification emails (though the emails still have
> to be checked manually for correctness).
>
> Nevertheless I think that the script is quite usable as it is and it
> would be great if other people could try it out, give feedback, and even
> submit patches.

I'll test it out some more, the issues I've had with it so far in
migrating from the existing script + some custom hacks we have to it
have been:

 * Overly verbose default templates, easy to overwrite now. Might send
   patches for some of them.
 * No ability to link to a custom gitweb, probably easy now.
 * If someone only pushes one commit I'd like to only have one e-mail
   with the diff, but if they push multiple commits I'd like to have a
   summary e-mail and replies to that which have the patches.

   It only seemed to support the latter mode, so you send out two
   e-mails for pushing one commit.
 * Ability to limit the number of lines, but not line length, that's
   handy for some template repositories. Should be easy to add
 * I wanted a hook to override the options passed to sendmail in some
   cases, looks easier now with the modular design.

But in addition to that we have our own custom E-Mail notification
scripts for:

 * People can subscribe to changes to certain files. I.e. if you
   modify very_important.c we'll send an E-Mail to a more widely seen
   review list.

 * Invididuals can also edit a config file to watch individual files /
   glob patterns of files, e.g. src/main.c or src/crypto*

I think a good way to support that would be to have either a path to a
config file with those watch specs, or a command so you could run "git
show ..." on some repo users can push to.

But overall it's very nice. I'll make some time to test it in my
organization (with lots of commits and people reading commit e-mails).