I was given the task of altering a SVN commit message hook(mailer.py) to send the messages as the author. The box was running Debian Etch, looking at the mailer.conf file I couldn’t figure out how to do that. There was no documentation that I could find.
Finally after much head scratching and searching I figured out that %(author)s situation variable can be used in from_addr. It was confirmed by http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/hook-scripts/mailer/mailer.conf.example.
Hope this will come in handy for someone trying to do the same.