Monitoring a repository for changes

Hi,

Currently if you want to monitor a repository for changes there are three options:

* Polling - run a script to check for updates every 60 seconds.
* Server side hooks
* Web hooks (on Github, Bitbucket etc.)

Unfortunately for many (most?) cases server-side hooks and web hooks are not suitable. They require you to both have admin access to the repo and have a public server available to push updates to. That is a huge faff when all I want to do is run some local code when a repo is updated (e.g. play a sound).

Currently people resort to polling (https://stackoverflow.com/a/5199111/265521) which is just ugly. I would like to propose that there should be a forth option that uses a persistent connection to monitor the repo. It would be used something like this:

    git watch https://github.com/git/git.git

or

    git watch git@github.com:git/git.git

It would then print simple messages to stdout. The complexity of what it prints is up for debate, - it could be something as simple as "PUSH\n", or it could include more information, e.g. JSON-encoded information about the commits. I'd be happy with just "PUSH\n" though.

In terms of implementation, the HTTP transport could use Server-Sent Events, and the SSH transport can pretty much do whatever so that should be easy.

Thoughts?

Tim