Incident: some custom notifications for nixpkgs have been lost

Development
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If you have nixpkgs-(committers/maintainers) access and use custom notifications on nixpkgs, those have unfortunately been lost and you have to re-configure them back.

For transparency purposes, here is what happened:

Yesterday I got a report from a user that nixpkgs-committers couldn’t close issues and needed triage access. This seemed like a thing nixpkgs-committers should be able to do.

This morning I changed the permissions quickly, in order to unblock the user.

Then two hours later, I panicked a bit when I saw users reporting they lost write access, ending up switching the nixpkgs-maintainers as well.

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So things are back to as they were before:

  • nixpkgs-committers: write
  • nixpkgs-maintainers: triage

Unfortunately, and something I didn’t know, is that GitHub reset custom notifications for those users.

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Does that mean I have to re-subscribe to PR’s and issues I was watching?

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From what I gathered, this only affects users that had set custom notifications here:

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I am fairly certain that I hadn’t explicitly set Custom notifications for Nixpkgs, since I didn’t know this option exists. I still got set to All Activity though.

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Since today noon (CET) I receive a lot of email notifications from nixpkgs that I’m not tagged in. I’m guessing this is the root cause, but I still need to figure out how to unsubscribe. :smile:

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Ah. It was suddenly set to “All activity”. Thx for the screenshot.
So same as khumba. (Should have read the entire thread first)

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Google’s cache of the NixOS/nixpkgs repository shows 181 watchers on 22 Mar 2022 08:09:34 GMT.

Right now it’s at 659 watchers. Something resulted in 500+ people likely being subscribed to every single GitHub event on the nixpkgs repository.

Going by my own inbox unread count before I clicked unwatch, that’s at least 85.000 notification emails…

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i have created an github ticket asking them if it is possible to rollback the notification settings

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Thanks for your transparency @zimbatm! Accidents happen to the best of us!

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Did your ticket get resolved @Artturin? Because my custom settings stayed as they were.

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Thanks @Artturin !

I must admit to not reviewing my settings carefully. For anyone who hasn’t found it yet, it is currently the first setting at github account settings for notifications.

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The picture shows the relevant setting: “Automatically watch repositories”.

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