[gentoo-dev] RFC: automatically mailing people on pkgcheck problems with their packages

[Michał Górny]

Hello,

As you have seen multiple times, I'm running a minimalistic CI service
for Gentoo that checks the repository for major issues using pkgcheck.
So far it's automation is limited to sending a mail to dedicated
gentoo-automated-testing@l.g.o mailing list on breakage
changes. From there, I compare the results to recent git log and mail
the developers at fault, pointing out the bad commit.

A few developers have already subscribed to the mailing list to check
if they haven't caused any new breakages and fix them quickly. For
others, it's pretty much just me caring to check, which also means that
when I'm not around things are left broken.

Automating the blaming process has been suggested multiple times
already but I so far considered it not worth the effort. Mostly because
many of the issues are indirect, and trying to automatically figure
them out from combination of the pkgcheck report and recent commits
would be hard, and could cause false positives. For example, some of
the depgraph breakages happen because of package.mask changes --
figuring that out automatically wouldn't be easy, and the script could
blame an irrelevant commit in the package.

However, it was suggested recently that I could make it mail
the maintainers of the affected packages. Even though most often it's
not them who are at fault, it was suggested that they'd prefer to know
that their packages are broken.

So what do you think? Would it be fine to mail the package maintainers
whenever their packages break? Would it be a problem if I just CC-ed
all the maintainers on the gentoo-automated-testing mails? Please note
that the breakages are catched per-package, and the script wouldn't be
able to respect restrict="" or hand-written maintainer descriptions ;-).

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>