Introduction

TwitVN - the coolest damned script a sysad will ever install

Details

TwitVN lets you publish your SVN commits to a twitter feed and include a trac link with it. Why? Basically so that you can have fun with your SVN traffic. You could have it all sent into your mail - but why? Why clutter your mail box? Send it to twitter - let them aggregate the RSS for you and put it in your managers favourite browser or rss reader, etc.

Hmm.. sounded like a good idea at the time :)

"Why Python?"

Right. I asked myself that the 9th time I forgot to indent something. The main reason was that I was at ErlLounge in SFC a couple of weeks ago and Steve from Reddit was talking about python with high regard. Now, in my opinion he's a smart dude so when he speaks highly about a language I'm going to listen.

So I knew I had to do the next random project in python.

"Why this project?"

Well it tickled a few fancies of mine:

• do something with the twitter API
• do something in python
• demystify the work going on in the dev dept of heysan

We get our heads down and work hard for weeks on end, we know we're working hard because we get svn emails - however the BD guys have no idea how much work is taking place. I could have added them to the email list that svn updates go to, I don't want to have to maintain a mailing list. I could have created a googlegroups mailing group and put one of the BD guys in charge of the subscriptions, but where is the fun in that? If someone is going to manage subscriptions why not make it to a fun service which does automagic RSS exporting too?!

I had fun writing this - and I think that was the most important thing. Start ups are, and should continue to be, fun for those working in them. Mini-tasks like this make it viable.

"I'm in! What do I do?"

K - as I've said I'm not really into python or its scene or its build process. So here are my recommended steps:

1. run linux
2. install subversion
3. put twitvn.py in your hooks directory
4. make sure it is executable
5. change the first line to wherever your dist installs the python executable
6. register a twitter user, add friends (keep the user's feed private if you dont want the world reading your commits...)
7. edit your post-commit file in hooks to look something like this (replacing the stuff in <>'s):

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

/opt/heysan-svn/hooks/twitvn.py -u <twitter username> -p <twitter password> -f "${REPOS}" -r "${REV}" -t "<url for trac>"

8. start commiting

wanna change some of it?

Feel free to. This is GPL v3 licensed so you can. Please send me anything that feels like it adds real worth to the community.

Some plans for the future

I can imagine I'll had hg support to it too. Also I kinda wanna neaten it up a lot - and I wanna remove the dependence on trac (easy to do..!)

contact

moc (tod) liamg (ta) herasso

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