Ping maintainers on breakage

timokau · August 22, 2019, 10:16pm

Hydra used to ping maintainers when their packages broke. It doesn’t do that anymore, since there was an incident where it spammed every maintainer.

I would propose to start pinging maintainers once again. There seems to be some kind of consensus that maintainers should have real responsibility and I think fixing breakage is a central part of that responsibility. I have even written a script for myself that scrapes hydra and sends me emails.

For spam mitigation, it may be interesting to look into

notifying only the maintainer of the actual broken derivation or the first maintainer(s) up the chain if there is none. This way a stdenv failure won’t spam every maintainer.
notifying only once per week (or other timeframe) per package

I’m not sure if I’m up to hacking hydra myself, so this is mostly intended as a discussion without promise of implementation.

aanderse · August 22, 2019, 10:34pm

Agreed. Especially with new RFC(s) discussing automation and escalated privileges for maintainers I think this is important.

worldofpeace · August 23, 2019, 5:38am

This would make my maintainer-ship a more convenient task. Currently I have to keep track of things on a regular basis, and if I don’t keep up things could be broken for a while.

I’d also like to note that maintainers are typically more responsive to notifications of breakage than, for example, updates. Though a possible drawback (maybe past issue?) is being notified repeatedly about transient failures. That would make this lose value.

mmahut · August 24, 2019, 9:17pm

Yes please. This would be really helpful.

smaret · August 26, 2019, 12:38pm

Being notified upon Hydra failure would be very useful. However I would prefer Hydra to open a n issue on GitHub (assigned to me) rather that receiving an email. This is would help tracking the issue and it would also allow to discuss the issue with other developers.

timokau · August 26, 2019, 3:09pm

That’s a very good idea. It would probably be best to implement that outside of hydra, is there some kind of API available?

smaret · August 26, 2019, 4:17pm

Yes: REST API endpoints for issues - GitHub Docs

FRidh · August 27, 2019, 5:08pm

Hydra also has an API:

github.com

NixOS/hydra/blob/906d2493c5c74673ba317d0b5ce7d97b062bd39b/doc/manual/api.xml

<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
         xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
         xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
         xml:id="chap-api">

  <title>Using the external API</title>

  <para>
    To be able to create integrations with other services, Hydra exposes
    an external API that you can manage projects with.
  </para>

  <para>
    The API is accessed over HTTP(s) where all data is sent and received
    as JSON.
  </para>

  <para>
    Creating resources requires the caller to be authenticated, while
    retrieving resources does not.

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knedlsepp · September 29, 2019, 7:08pm

I also very much miss these notifications.

SRGOM · October 9, 2019, 10:13am

To prevent spam of email/issues- perhaps the title could be of the format- hash-package name (Path inside /nix/store) and if it’s found that such an issue has been closed in the last 10 days then don’t create a new one.

ckauhaus · October 28, 2019, 10:51am

I’d also prefer to receive mails from Hydra.

bdesham · March 11, 2021, 1:35am

Here is a later Discourse thread on the same topic. (The feature was not implemented there either, unfortunately.)

raboof · March 11, 2021, 9:58am

I would love this as a maintainer (though perhaps I would also like to receive email)

I would also love this as a non-maintainer: this would provide an obvious place to share information on the failure, so that as a ‘casual’ contributor it is easy to read up on what has been already found out about it, use that as a starting point to investigate further and share your your results (even if you didn’t get far enough to be able to produce a PR).