[rancid] Daily Difference Digest?

[Paul Gear]

On 10/23/2013 06:35 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 23/10/2013 07:31, Tyler Christiansen wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> Apologies if this has been asked, but searching the web doesn't turn up
>> much (and it's made more difficult by the fact that searching for
>> 'rancid difference daily digest' and similar items turns up nothing but
>> stomach digestion information!).
>>
>> Is it possible to configure Rancid to e-mail differences in a daily
>> digest format?  We might make several small changes throughout the day,
>> and instead of getting e-mailed every time we make a change, I'd like to
>> get a summary of all changes for the entire day.
>>
>> Thanks for any tips/help/advice/etc!
>
>
> To the best of my knowledge rancid doesn't do that natively. It would be
> hard to code it, as rancid uses the classic method to send mail: print
> text and pipe it to a mailer. To digest, rancid would have to store
> mails somewhere and gather them up once a day in a cron
>
> Digest is best done in your mail system, not in your rancid system. The
> method I use is to send all rancid mail to a Mailman instance and tell
> the users to sign themselves up. They can choose digest or individual
> mails as they prefer and I don't have to get involved.
>
> Many other possible solutions exist, depending on how big your setup is,
> how many devices and users, etc.

I like Alan's suggestion about Mailman.  Here's another: don't email 
changes to everyone - just put them in a mailbox that receives the email.

Then set up a separate process to run once a day which just does a diff 
from the top of each svn repository where you store RANCID configs (i.e. 
one for each group).  Email this to all the people who need the daily 
digest.

Paul