I added svn commit watching to Kirby. Add a repository url with the add_svn keyword. Kirby will poll more often when people are talking, less when the channel is idle, and announce the details of each commit.

remote access considered fine

Because it is not callback-based, you can watch any repository that has anonymous checkout. If you need Kirby to authenticate, you can set up an ssh key and use an svn+ssh:// url.

Download the latest version from Fauna, or check out from svn as described here.

code story

The original methods, borrowed from Matzbot, were hackish, threaded, and large, and used regular expressions for parsing. I rewrote these to an unthreaded 16-line procedure. Then, noticing that svn log has an --xml parameter, I rewrote it again to parse with Hpricot. 11 lines total, at the small cost of another dependency.

Hpricot makes xml parsing a joy.