About one week ago, Aaron Brady posted a svnstatus.py script which displays an SVN repository version history in an HTML document. I liked it and wanted to use it as a post-commit hook script for the XMLObject SVN repository. But svnstatus is not optimal at all. If you want to periodically build a static HTML file it’s ok. The problem, if you want to use it in post-commit hook is that it rebuilds the file for each commit, which turns to be really CPU hungry.

That’s why i wrote SubveRSSed.py. SubveRSSed incrementally builds an RSS feed containing the commit history of a SVN Repository. Then an HTML document is built based upon the RSS feed. This approach has many advantages:

  • post-commit hook friendly :)
  • the RSS can be made available for aggregators and people can monitor the activity/vitality of a repository
  • the history can still be consulted via the HTML document, if you don’t like aggregators nor RSS ;)

But there is one issue thought, the RSS accumulates all revisions, so it can grow enormously. I think i’ll make 2 feeds, one complete and one with the 20 latest revisions .. So SubverRSSed will evolve, may be in the PythonFR SVN repository :-)

BTW, many thanks to Aaron for svnstatus from which SubveRSSed used some functions and embedded CSS.

update: the script now handles 2 RSS feeds as described above :)

update2 : check out SubveRSSed at this url

update3(2005/05/05) : There’s a more recent post about this script.