ciabot scripts and merge flood prevention

There's a problem with the old ciabot scripts, and I think also the v3 versions, when two published branches are merged. In this case, ciabot reports all the changes twice, once when they're first committed to the first branch, and a second time when the first branch is merged into the second. This can unleash a flood of redundant commit messages that wipes out conversation in any poor irc channel that has CIA in it. I've generated floods that lasted up to 15 minutes.

I document the problem and one solution here. There's also a link to the hook script Gnome is using, based on the same method. http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/lazyweb:_git_cia_hooks/ Maybe this could be built into the ciabot scripts?

(BTW, in both scripts, the example of git-rev-list ... | tac could perhaps more efficiently be written as git-rev-list --reverse ...)