CVSspam

About

CVSspam emails you diffs when someone commits a change to your CVS repository. These HTML mails hyperlink to further details and use styling to emphasise information structure.

Example

See a basic example and an artificially complicated test case email.

Features

Every email includes colourised unified-diffs for all changed text files, and the committer's log comment.
If configured, mails can include links to Bugzilla bugs, RT tickets and JIRA issues, from specially formated log messages.
If configured, mails can include links to a ViewCVS, CVSweb or Chora view of your repository. Particularly useful for seeing binary image files before and after a change.
Written in Ruby. You do have it installed, don't you?

Documentation

Read the documentation in HTML or PDF formats.

See Ruslan Hristov's procedure for setting up CVSspam with CVS in a chroot jail.

Known Issues

You may encounter these problems, using the current release:

If a file is added to the repository, and a file with the same name previously existed there, CVSspam will erroneously claim file was modified (it should say it was added).
When using some CVS clients (e.g. Eclipse's built in CVS support) the files listed in CVSspam emails will not be sorted in alphabetical order.

Download

New releases are announced on freshmeat.

Gentoo Linux has a CVSspam ebuild.

Current

2004-08-24 cvsspam-0.2.11.tar.gz ~61kB

Stop commit's from some Mac CVS clients breaking the Subject, and all following headers
Stop a '.' appearing on a line on its own in the commit log comment breaking this, and subsequent notification emails
Made the $no_removed_file_diff option work
Implemented a $no_added_file_diff option to suppress inclusion of diffs containing the contents of added files, and a $no_diff option, for supression diffs entirely


      Tried to fix breakage of the tag in the email subject (which creates
      text like #<Repository:0x402d08c4>, rather than the
      name of the top-level CVS project directory).  Fix
      unconfirmed
      Altered some of the HTML-generating code making it less likely to
      produce super-long lines in the email markup
      Fixed unescaped ampersand in the HTML
      Supply missing repository_name attribute to CVSweb
      code


    Previous
    2004-08-24 cvsspam-0.2.10.tar.gz
       ~57kB
    
      The expansion of a CVS username in CVSROOT/users may now contain
      whitespace, although we may still not be properly handling quotes in this
      file
      A 2 megabyte limit is placed on the amount of diff output included
      in emails.  The limit is 'soft'; we are allowed to pass the limit
      to prevent truncating a file's diff midway (but note that a seperate
      limit on the number of lines in an individual file's diff already
      exists)
      When using SMTP directly to send mail, a date header is now included,
      as its lack broke most mail-reader's sort-by-date functionality
      Fixes problems in commitinfo argument parsing that would prevent
      CVSspam working with the CVS 1.12.x series
      Work around occasional received broken pipe signal errors
      from CVS, in at least some cases
    
    2004-05-10 cvsspam-0.2.9.tar.gz
       ~54kB
    
      Take sender email addresses from the
      CVSROOT/users
      config file, if it exists
      Truncate super-long lines in diff output
      Fix an error generating the email subject under certain
      circumstances
      Multi-repository support for CVSweb
    
    2003-09-23 cvsspam-0.2.8.tar.gz
       ~53kB
    
      Support sending email using Net::SNMP for people with no MTA on
          their CVS server
      Support ViewCVS's multiple-repository feature
      Documentation improvements
      Fix some 'uninitialized variable' warnings
    
    2003-07-12 cvsspam-0.2.7.tar.gz
       ~43kB
    
      Any CVS branch name is included in the email subject, and the names
          of files commited may be added too
      CVSweb is now a supprted web front-end
      The script can make better From addresses when using a CVS pserver
          with aliased usernames, using a new --user flag
      JIRA issue numbers and RT ticket numbers can be made into links from
          the log comment.
    
    2003-03-24 cvsspam-0.2.6.tar.gz
       ~25kB
    
      Fix temp-file security problems (and honour $TMPDIR)
      Encode non-ASCII characters in the email Subject header (per
          RFC2047)
      Support Chora as well as ViewCVS
      When all files where commited on the same branch, don't display the
          branch name against every file
      Make each component of a file's path into a link, and carry any
          branch name though to the dir-view (ViewCVS only)
      Tries to generate X-Originating-IP header for remote CVS commits
      Fixed more HTML issues
    
    2003-01-15 cvsspam-0.2.5.tar.gz
       ~23kB
    
      Supports committing to many top-level projects under a CVSROOT at
          once, which used to cause an infinite loop
      Now reports branch name for deleted files (as well as added or
          modified ones)
      Changes in RCS keywords may now be suppressed in diff output
          (e.g. changes in $Revision$ number)
      The contents of files that are being removed may be excluded from
          mails
      The the character-encoding specified in the mail headers is
          configurable
      Small tweaks to the message formatting
    
    2002-11-17 cvsspam-0.2.4.tar.gz
       ~20kB
    
      Really use the $cvs_prog from the config file
      Prevent error on adding directory to CVS
      Make URLs and email addresses from log comment into links in HTML
      Fix some cases of broken HTML generation
      Improved formatting
    
    2002-11-02 cvsspam-0.2.3.tar.gz
       ~22kB
    
      Truncate diff output after 1000 lines
      Make files in the same dir easier to spot in the top-of-mail
          index
      Make bug regexp match more possibilities
      Fix some broken HTML syntax
    
    2002-10-30 cvsspam-0.2.2.tar.gz
       ~19kB
    
      Diff output not (less?) broken
      Generates prefixes like [CVS repositoryname] for mail
          subjects
      In some versions of ruby there was a syntax error
      On some setups it complained about diff having failed, when it
          hadn't
      Displays branch names and versions (with viewcvs links) in the
          top-of-mail file index
      Binary and Empty files only appear in the top-of-mail index, not in
          the 'diffs' section
      If the only change on a line is the dos vs. unix line type, try
          to highlight that
      Restricts length of the subject to 200 chars
      Tweaked HTML a bit for Evolution (but still no colour highlights)
    
    2002-10-13 cvsspam-0.2.1.tar.gz
       ~19kB

    Contact
    Email questions, bug reports, feature requests and patches to the
       cvsspam-devel mailing list.
       The lead develper is David
       Holroyd.

    Related Projects
    Other software doing the same thing
    
      cvsmail
      CVSreport
      cvs-syncmail
      cvsmailer
      DevGuy cvsnotify
      CVSMailer
      activitymail (and now, SVN::Notify, too)
      CVSToys
      cvscommit
      cvslog
      commitmessage
      deluxeloginfo
      dcvs-mailcommit
      lalaCVSMail
    
    Also, try the dmoz.org CVS category
    Software supported by CVSspam
    Web frontends to CVS
    
      ViewCVS
      Chora
      CVSweb
    
    Bug/Issue tracking
    
      Bugzilla
      JIRA (also,
      see Jerome Lacoste's JiraCVSSpamLogHandler)
      RT
    

    Many Satisfied Customers!
    
      "The outlook express spell checker offers the word Cesspit as a
         replacement for the misspelled word CVSspam"
    — Matthew Lenz
    

    
      "CVSspam - nomen est omen!"
    — Sascha Sadeghian
    

    
      "Hmmm .. I wonder about a meeting of the badgers in foil and
      Why's chunky bacon foxes
      .. perhaps in the next installment of the
      poignant guide?"
      — George Marrows