Re: Bug#505968: ITP: urlwatch -- email notifications of changes to URLs

[Francois Marier <francois@debian.org>]

Hi Lucas,

Thanks for the CC by the way, I'm not subscribed to debian-devel@l.d.o

On 2008-11-17 at 11:57:44, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> websec provides very similar functionality. Is urlwatch better than
> websec?

Good question. Here's what the author of urlwatch has to say about it:

---
urlwatch has an easier configuration (urls.txt is just a text file with
one URL per line), websec has a more sophisticated (read: complicated)
way of setting up things.

urlwatch can look for non-existent pages (i.e. you enter a URL and as
soon as it becomes available, e.g. non-404, you get notified).

urlwatch is written in Python, so newcomers and advanced users familiar
with Python have an easier time customizing the hooks.py file and the
program itself.

urlwatch always sends you plaintext mail, no HTML (a _good_ thing!)

In my opinion, urlwatch has an easier way of getting rid of
always-changing content via the hooks.py file. It also allows things
like watching ical files for changes without having to understand the
ical format (by transforming ical to plaintext, see the examples).

For web pages (HTML), urlwatch supports cleaning up bad HTML to have
easier-to-read diffs via utidylib.
---

Cheers,
Francois