Hi, Dermot -
I have a few comments that are Mercurial-specific here, and a couple of
others that I think could make change notifications more useful to
people.
> - Subject contains "<SCM identifer> <Repository>/<Module> <Author>"
> eg: "SVN commit: jds/spec-files dermot". Possibly add
> Revision/Transaction Id, but nothing else.
You should not use revision IDs with Mercurial, as changeset IDs are big
hex hashes, and revision numbers are not portable or informative.
> - Body contains normal header stuff: Repository, Module, Branch,
> Author, Date, Revision Id
In the case of Mercurial, it would make sense to include a URL where
people can view the changeset and its diffs online. You get the
integrated web server for free, so might as well make use of it :-)
> - Body also contains lists of files modified, added and deleted.
Personally, I don't find lists of file names very informative. What is
much more helpful is including the output of the diffstat command. In
case you haven't seen diffstat output, here's what it looks like:
drivers/w1/w1.c | 58 +++++++++++++++-------------------------------------
drivers/w1/w1.h | 3 --
drivers/w1/w1_int.c | 34 +++++++++---------------------
3 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 66 deletions(-)
It's easy to see how you could postprocess this to add one more letter
to indicate whether a file really got added or removed.
I find the standard CVS and Subversion commit notifications to be very
underinformative, compared to this :-)
Finally, Python contains some very nice email-related modules that make
it easy to compose stuff like this as multipart MIME messages, so that
you could for example have the diffstat as a separate body part that
would not be displayed unless people wanted to see it. Just a thought.
<b
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