Should support mail notification of new and changed pages.
Hmm, should be easy to implement this.. it runs as a svn post-coommit hook
already, so just look at the userdb, svnlook at what's changed, and send
mails to people who have subscribed.
A few details:
-
[[Joey]] mentioned that being able to subscribe to globs as well as
explicitly named pages would be desirable.
-
I think that since we're using Perl on the backend, being able to
let users craft their own arbitrary regexes would be good.
Joey points out that this is actually a security hole, because Perl
regexes let you embed (arbitrary?) Perl expressions inside them. Yuck!
(This is not actually true unless you "use re 'eval';", without which
(?{ code }) is disabled for expressions which interpolate variables.
See perldoc re, second paragraph of DESCRIPTION. It's a little iffy
to allow arbitrary regexen, since it's fairly easy to craft a regular
expression that takes unbounded time to run, but this can be avoided
with the use of alarm to add a time limit. Something like
eval { # catches invalid regexen
no re 'eval'; # to be sure
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die };
alarm(1);
... stuff involving m/$some_random_variable/ ...
alarm(0);
};
if ($@) { ... handle the error ... }
should be safe. --[[WillThompson]])
It would also be good to be able to subscribe to all pages except discussion pages or the SandBox: `* !*/discussion !sandobx`, maybe --[[Joey]]
-
Of course if you do that, you want to have form processing on the user
page that lets them tune it, and probably choose literal or glob by
default.
I think that the new globlist() function should do everything you need.
Adding a field to the prefs page will be trivial --[[Joey]]
The first cut, I suppose, could use one sendmail process to batch-mail all
subscribers for a given page. However, in the long run, I can see users
demanding a bit of feature creep:
- Each user should be able to tune whether they see the actual diff parts or
not.
- Each user should be able to set a maximum desired email size.
- We might want to support a user-specified shibboleth string that will be
included in the email they receive so they can easily procmail the messages
into a folder.
--[[BrandenRobinson]]
I'm deferring these nicities until there's some demonstrated demand
--[[Joey]].
