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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:

  1. [[Joey]] mentioned that being able to subscribe to globs as well as explicitly named pages would be desirable.

  2. 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]]
  1. 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:

  1. Each user should be able to tune whether they see the actual diff parts or not.
  2. Each user should be able to set a maximum desired email size.
  3. 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]].