Programming Jabber

CVS Notifications via Jabber

While email-based notifications are useful, we can add value to this process by using a more immediate (and penetrating) form of communication: Jabber. Although mail clients can be configured to check for mail automatically on a regular basis, using an IM-style client has a number of immediately obvious advantages:

• It’s likely to take up less screen real estate.

• No amount of tweaking of the mail client’s autocheck frequency (which, if available, will log in, check for, and pull emails from the mail server) will match the immediacy of IM-style message push.

• In extreme cases, the higher the autocheck frequency of the mail client, the higher the effect on overall system performance.

• Depending on the configuration, an incoming Jabber message can be made to pop up, with greater effect.

• A Jabber user is more likely to have a Jabber client running permanently than an email client.

• It’s more fun!

The design of CVS’s notification mechanism is simple and abstract enough for us to put an alternative notification system in place. If we substitute the formula in the notify configuration file with something that will call a Jabber script, we might end up with something like:

ALL python cvsmsg %s

Like the previous formula, it will be invoked by CVS to send the notification, and the %s will be substituted by the recipient’s address determined from the users file. In this case, the Python script cvsmsg is called. However, now that we’re sending a notification ...