And if not, why not? Is this something that people would be interested in?
I have GitHub - samuela/nixpkgs-upkeep: Auto-updates and CI 🤖 for Nixpkgs set up to run builds every 12 hours on packages that I use and alert me if they fail, so it occurred to me that more people could use something like this…
It has capability to e-mail the committers, but on hydra.nixos.org that’s unused for years, as it (reportedly) generated too many messages in practice.
One issue is the huge influx of commits, so you diff only large amounts of them at a time and thus you (need to) send a message to all of them with the whole list of regressions.
… 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.
Ok, I modified nixpkgs-upkeep to periodically build a set of packages I care about and automatically create GitHub issues (with maintainers cc’d!) when they fail to build on master. Here’s an example of what one of the issues look like: `python3Packages.sentry-sdk` build failure on x86_64-linux as of `ab14cf22` · Issue #157222 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.
Feel free to send PRs for other packages you’d like to have alerts for!