How to get notification if package fails to build on Hydra?

[abathur]

Common request that seems to come up about once a year:

• Ping maintainers on breakage
• RSS feed for "newly failing builds" from Hydra
• When hydra fails to build a package, does it notify maintainers?
• Subscribe to build failures for certain packages?

The most-succinct comment I recall seeing on the issue/status is probably:

When hydra fails to build a package, does it notify maintainers?

… and there was a situation when the situation from the second quote lead to the first one. It was something with branch setup, and Hydra ended up sending hundreds of email (per person) to a large fraction of active maintainers. Naturally, this was found an unacceptable failure mode. Nobody since have proposed patches that would even claim to protect from this failure mode well enough that reenabling the emails could be discussed.