Just a quick guide on how to enable email notifications in Subversion repositories for GNU/Debian Unstable.

Make sure that you have the subversion-tools package installed:

aptitude install subversion-tools

On the Subversion server go to the path where your repository is located.

$ cd /path/to/repo/

There should be a folder called "hooks".

$ ls -l

Copy the file "post-commit.tmpl" to "post-commit" and make it executable by the UID of the webserver (I'm using Subversion through Apache2 module, this may vary for your setup).

$ cp hooks/post-commit.tmpl hooks/post-commit $ chown www-data hooks/post-commit $ chmod 700 hooks/post-commit

Now create a symlink which points at the Python mailer.py script in the repository root.

$ ln -s /usr/share/subversion/hook-scripts/mailer/mailer.py .

Copy the example configuration for the mailer.py to the root.

$ cp /usr/share/subversion/hook-scripts/mailer/mailer.conf.example mailer.conf

Open mailer.conf with an editor and look for "to_addr" and set it to the recipient (either a person or preferably a mailinglist). There are a lot of other settings you can optionally tweak. A good one would be "from_addr" which I have set to the revisions commiter:

from_addr = %(author)s@fladi.at

To test the email notification we can call mailer.py manually:

$ python mailer.py commit /path/to/repo/ 155 /path/to/repo/mail.conf

The number 155 indicates the revision for which a notification should be sent. This revision has to exist!

If you have received an email consisting of the changes for the specified revision you are done. Further commits should now trigger the notifications automatically. Congrats!