Also, I think you are onto something. Git remotes are mostly passive, where you have to pull to see whether there are any updates. There is no subscription model to get notified of changes. You have to actively pull to find out what is new.
You should try to make this as a standalone service, which works with Git remotes, not just a Git hosting party. Then locally, you can pull the repo/commits and check what has updated (diff) and inform subscribers accordingly.
I'm trying to validate whether there's any interest in something this, so I definitely cut a lot of corners (e.g. the app doesn't maintain a copy of the repository — it just uses the GitHub API). Also using GitHub in the name might not have been the best idea.. though! ;)
I agree with you regarding the usefulness of watching arbitrary repositories. There's already git-notifier [0] that does pretty much this, but you have to set it up for yourself and it has to be configured using a text file.
https://github.com/ianmiell/alert-on-change/blob/master/READ...
I write plugins for RpgMaker and a lot of the people who use them are regular users who don't know how to use GitHub. Some of them had asked for a way they could get notifications every time I update a plugin, this will be very useful for that.
Can I request a feature? Would be nice to have a way I could pass the repository and file names on the query string, so I can put a link where people only need to inform their email and submit to start receiving notifications for that.
The GitHub API allows up to 5,000 requests per hour. I currently poll once an hour, so there's a bit of headway. If that becomes a problem, I think I can always space out checks for less-active repositories (there's also the option of allowing users to authenticate with GitHub and use their own quota so they don't have to share it with anyone else).
Cheers
https://github.com/ianmiell/alert-on-change/blob/master/READ...
It's probably more suited for the programming types.
For example, you can do a 'raw' GitHub request to determine when a particular file has changed.
I definitely plan to add this if there's enough interest. There should be a link to a mailing list to be notified when that rolls around (http://eepurl.com/bILhR1).
Thanks for checking it out anyway! : )
It's slightly more convenient for me to get a notification than to periodically pull repositories and check them for changes, but I understand that might not be the case for everyone!
