Svnnotify's commit e-mails don't generate color diffs for me. The mail body is HTML-formatted, but the diffs looks like normal diffs... I.e., the removed and added rows have - and + in the left column, but there's no color.

I'd appreciate any pointers for where I should look to find out what's broken. I followed all the rules when installing it (I swear!) but I must have done something wrong.

Here's the environment:

The server's running Ubuntu Hardy, with the latest package versions.

Svn is version 1.4.6, installed from Hardy packages.

Perl is v5.8.8.

Svnnotify is SVN-Notify-2.78, downloaded from CPAN. The installation was: perl Makefile.PL, make, make test, make install. I didn't see any obviously bad errors during the installation.

/var/lib/svn/dev/hooks/post-commit does this:

svnnotify --repos-path "$REPOS" --revision "$REV" --to commit-watchers --user-domain fsci.com --subject-prefix "[SVN COMMIT]" --handler HTML::ColorDiff -d

Thanks!

Some progress --

@theory: I compared it to the page you cited, and the style tag etc. look the same.

I neglected to say that I'm on a Mac, and I'm running MS Entourage 2008...

I tried this: I saved an svnnotify e-mail to disk, and looked at it in Preview. No change, it was still just black and white text. But then I changed the file extension to .html, opened it again in Preview and -presto- the colors appear!

So, the message contains the right markup. But Entourage doesn't want to display it.

I checked the MIME type of the message I saved to disk, both before and after changing the file extension. It's "message/rfc822." I pawed through Entourage settings, and didn't find anything appropriate. It's set up for HTML e-mail, and I can receive messages with color text correctly.

So something is making Entourage ignore certain markup tags in svnnotify's e-mail. Are there useful svnnotify options that I should try? I'm also going to search for bug reports/complaints about Entourage's handling of HTML e-mail, and see if I can find anything useful.

Resolution: Yep, it's Entourage's HTML rendering engine. Ick. The HTML messages it creates aren't anywhere near valid markup. To call Entourage's HTML generation a subset of the HTML spec would be technically correct, but maybe a bit generous. :-)

I'm sure they had good reasons for this... The Entourage documentation mentions providing sufficient HTML support for "messaging" but not for creating "full websites." Whatever, it is what it is...

A suggestion for the SVN-Notify documentation: Consider adding a table of known good & bad e-mail client HTML rendering. At least in the context of SVN-Notify generated e-mail. If, for example, Entourage sucks, Outlook sucks less, and Thunderbird works great with svnnotify's e-mail, that would be good for future svnnotify users to know.

Thank you for the swift and helpful responses! I'm not going to try writing a filter for Entourage -- when Snow Leopard comes out, we might solve this by all of us switching to Mac Mail. (Assuming, that is, SL's Mac Mail doesn't have similar limitations.)

John