how to monitor a remote read-only subversion repo for commit changes?

Question

I have a couple of dependencies in my Java project on 3rd party libs, and some of them are undergoing development that I would like to track.

I would like to be able to be notified, (By email, desktop popup, or otherwise) when changes are committed to the remote svn repo so I can examine their impact etc.

I looked at svnmailer, but it would seem to require the repo to be local (I think??)

also I found some windows tools that do the job, but I am running linux desktop. so no go there.

worst case, I can do some cron script to poll for remote changes using the command line tools, but I would prefer some existing tool.

Answer 1

Sounds like a good use for a continuous integration server. Something like CruiseControl or Hudson are designed for this use case - the whole point of them is to to check your source control regularly, retrieve any changes, build the project and notify someone. In this case, it sounds like you don't even need to build the project, just send an email anyway.

If you don't already have a CI server this might seem like a little overkill but I bet once you've got one set up you'll find yourself using it again.