[racket-dev] Commit notifications

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Mon Oct 18 17:08:16 EDT 2010

I just made a change to the commit notification script -- in addition
to sending the email to `commits at racket-lang.org', it also sends it to
the committers (both the committers and the commit authors).  This
means that if you push a commit done by someone else, they'll get the
notification email too.

Notes (or, "questions disguised as notes"):

* I also changed the script to notify everyone when there are pushes
  to a branch.  Previously, it wouldn't do that, since we had a bunch
  of branches and it seemed bad to notify everyone when pushes
  happened on such branches.  This is needed now so I can tell when
  Ryan merges commits to the release branch -- and eventually it lead
  me to the above change: I'm going to *re-disable* these messages,
  and add an option so certain people can be CCed on changes that
  happen on some branches.  Together with the above change, it means
  that when Ryan merges a commit done by Foo, then the people who will
  get the notifications are: Ryan and me (since he's the pusher, and
  both of us are set for the `release' branch) and also anyone who
  wrote one of the merged commits.  Bottom line: if you ask for a
  commit to be merged to the release, you'll get notified when it's
  done.  Please tell me if you think that notifying everyone on
  changes to `release' is better.

* I made this happen only when a configuration option is set, and
  there is no way to set it on your own private repos.  I can do that
  if needed, so tell me if you find a use for that.  This can be a
  problem if you maintain a repository that is a fork of the plt one:
  every time that you'll grab commits from the main repo, you'll be
  sending notifications for the people who did them, and that's
  unlikely to be desired.

* I considered also looking into the log messages and finding emails.
  The problem is that this shouldn't be done on just any pattern that
  looks like an email (for example, scribble syntax can lead to false
  positives), and if I add some magic pattern then chances are that
  people won't remember it.  OTOH, it looks to me like there's not
  much use for that.  Again, tell me if you think that it's a good
  idea to do this after all.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!


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