Talk:Notifier.pl

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item. Please refer to [[MediaWiki automation]] instead.

We need utility which runs as a daemon and uses a set of rules specifying information sources to be checked on a schedule. It is still in development and is based on the wikid.pl Perl script. It is currently just a single script containing snippets from daemonise.pl, wiki.pl, irc.pl, POP3.pl and server.pl. Eventually we plan to change those diverse functionalities from re-usable Perl code snippets to proper Perl modules which will be installed into the Perl environment from the Debian Post Install procedure.

Rules

The rules are defined as a list of items and can reside in a location available from any of the protocols it's set up to read from. Currently the rules must be bullet lists of 6 items as follows. Each set of these six items found in the rules resource will become an active task in the schedule. Our notifier rules are in Config:Notifier.

Rule Items

• Schedule: pattern to be applied to localtime
• Source: URL (file, http, mediawiki, pop3
• Match: Regular expression to determine information to extract from source
• Target: URL (file, mediawiki, mailto, irc)
• Message: containing $n args
• Comment: containing $n args (optional, used by some protocols like wiki or svn)

Example Uses

• SVN changes sent to chat room
• Changes to files appended to a log file
• Changed files syncronised to wiki article
• Changed articles written to files
• Price of a product changing shows up in wiki changes
• Checking search engine rankings of various keywords and phrases