3.3 Automatic Synchronization and Status Reports

It is convenient to invoke such synchronization automatically, for example once every day. If you have enabled commit notifications for the project’s repository, any new changes will be visible for subscribers. Here is an example crontab entry:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
@daily              cd $HOME/projects/www-lang; make VCS=yes

The job doesn’t have to run on the team leader’s machine, since all team members have write access to their project repository.

If desired, you could set up another job to report the status of the translations weekly or fortnightly, for example:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
@weekly             cd $HOME/projects/www-lang; \
                       make report | mail -s "Weekly statistics" \
                       www-lang[email protected]

Caution: Most cron implementations do not allow the character ‘\’ as a line continuation character—the example shown is made that way for better readability.