How to make SVN communicate

I hope this is just the beginning of short but useful tips and articles that can help you out sometime in the future.

One of the most important things in project management is communication, are all members of your team good at communicating? Does SVN communicate with you and let you know whats going on? If not you might be missing out on what your team is doing.

SVN is a great tool but you may not be getting everything out of it you can, it has hooks built in that let you do pretty amazing things one of the more important ones is email, by having SVN email you the details on every commit you can see whats going on with your project, even better yet email all programmers even if they are not on your team, Why? The more people that see the code the more knowledge is shared, Imagine a programmer eating lunch in another department browsing your code and seeing a better way to do something?

How can you do this? Its pretty simple, first SVN comes with some premade scripts, one of them being commit-email.pl, copy this into a easy location to use, I like to use /svn/config as a general dumping ground for shared files like this and permission files.

You have to make it executable, on unix thats easy, chmod 755, if your running svn through web dav/apache you might need to do something like chown apache.apache on the file as well, both of these settings may be different depending on the system and your security needs.

In your projects svn directory there will be a hooks directory, for example on my server its /svn/project/hooks copy post-commit.tmpl to post-commit and again make it runnable and give it proper permissions. Edit the file and adjust the bottom to look like this


REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"

/svn/config/commit-email.pl "$REPOS" "$REV" -s "Project Name" groupemail@email.com

I hope this helps those not already doing this to improve there improve there development practices.