Here’s one of those projects that you dream up just to avoid doing more important/useful work: FFmpeg SVN to Twitter gateway. I, too, am now contributing to the notorious fail whale.

All the kids are talking about this Twitter thing these days. I have read up on some kind of open API they offer. I’m not really that keen on these modern web-based APIs. I had a feeling that someone must have a Python API for it and sure enough: python-twitter. So that takes care of that half of the gateway.

The other half is interfacing to FFmpeg SVN. I already have this part reasonably figured out thanks to FATE— my current method is to simply execute ‘svn’ via shell and parse the stdout. It seems that there are a few cleaner Python-oriented solutions for this. But all I really need is to parse the current revision number from ‘svn info’ and then parse the output of ‘svn log -r <rev>’.

Perhaps the craziest part of my solution is that I’m using an sqlite3 database to store a single piece of data– the revision. Hey, I just find it to be the simplest solution, oddly enough.

I imagine it would be possible to engineer the Twitter update as a function triggered during a commit. However, I tend to think it’s not a good idea to have a commit trigger that is dependent on an RPC call to a web service that has a tenuous uptime reputation.

Now to sit back and see if anyone actually follows the account (besides spammers).