It seems to work, but the RSS feed omits many of the changes for the file.

At this point i think it's fair to say that none of us are certain ;). AFAIK, none of "the regulars" use the RSS feed and that code may well need some updating in order to report the same things as the timeline would. The RSS code hasn't been materially changed since 2015 or earlier.

I used to use rss as a way to know when Fossil was updated. I had an app on my phone that I would use to refresh the timeline without having to browse to the webpage.

Now I usually rely on the email notifications for changes.

Perhaps the email messages could be expanded to include a list of files that are changed, and for that to be a configurable option?

It might be a really long list on a branch that syncs with trunk, but perhaps it could be truncated.

As Stephan pointed out elsewhere (Fossil or pikchr), browsers removed native rss feed support some years ago, unfortunately. IMO, as a result, rss is now more niche than it's been in a long, long time, at least from what I can tell.

As Stephan pointed out elsewhere (Fossil or pikchr), browsers removed native rss feed support some years ago, unfortunately. IMO, as a result, rss is now more niche than it's been in a long, long time, at least from what I can tell.

That's also my take on it - i stopped using RSS when it became a hassle to use (when browser stopped supporting it natively).

However, all that's needed to update the timeline.rss with many of /timeline's filtering features is for someone who's itched by the problem to write the code. Hint, hint ;).

Perhaps the email messages could be expanded to include a list of files that are changed, and for that to be a configurable option?

FWIW, i'm of two minds on that one. On the one hand, it would be interesting from time to time. On the other, the link in the notification provides that information for the more common case where we don't care to see the details in email. The merge case you mention can lead to particularly large mails and a repository may need to send out dozens or hundreds of them.

On the other hand... this forum (keeping in mind that forum notifications use the same underlying pieces as checkin and wiki edit notifications) has almost 500 subscribers and every notification has to be sent to all of them. Many forum posts (like this one) probably result in larger notifications than most checkin notifications, including the file list, would. Every now and then we see 1000-line forum posts on the sqlite forum (almost 1100 subscribers) when people paste in large db schemas. In short, we're already producing far more mail volume in forum notifications than we would via checkin notifications, even if the file list were included in each one, so perhaps including the list of files in each notification wouldn't be a significant hit.

My use-case for RSS file change notifications is that I want to use github actions to periodically poll the RSS feed, and automatically create github issues telling me to make the corresponding update to my Go port of Pikchr, so unfortunately email would not work.

If I get a bit of time, I'll take a look at the code. However, I don't completely trust myself to write good C code :-)

Thanks for the help!