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

[Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org>]

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On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 6:36 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>

Hi!


>
> 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@lists.gentoo.org 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.
>
>
So this sort of brings up a point of responsibility.



> 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.
>

I think there are a few issues:

1) Not everyone cares. I think you can either go for an opt-in approach
(hard..you need to keep state) or offer clear opt-out / filtering
instructions (link in the bottom of the email that points at the opt-out
instructions on wiki.) Either decision will piss people off; I wouldn't
fret it as long as you pick one.

2) Unclear ownership of the problem. One guy makes a commit, 100 packages
break. Who is responsible? Its really murky. This is really the toughest
problem to me.

3) Problems are not stateless (e.g. many are transient as they are fixed
later by developers.) Is the email I got 8 hours ago still relevant? What
we normally see in items like this is a framework to manage "incidents". So
what you might see is an incident App. The CI infrastructure detects a
problem and opens an incident. At incident open, you trigger a notification
(said email). Typically incidents can be claimed (a human takes ownership
and fixes the incident) or perhaps a future run of the automation detects
that the incident is fixed and closes the incident.

The problem of course with 3 is that you are very much re-inventing a bunch
of functionality that is already in bugzilla; which leads to the argument
of 'why not open bugs for breakages' ;)

-A


>
> 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/>
>

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