[Haskell-cafe] Hackage feature request: E-mail author when a package breaks

[Ketil Malde]

Max Bolingbroke <batterseapower at hotmail.com> writes:

>> This is where it stranded the last time, IIRC.  That sentiment makes me
>> a bit uneasy; so you are the official maintainer of a package on
>> Hackage, but you do not want to hear about it when it fails to compile?

> Don't forget that some packages fail to compile on Hackage even though
> they work fine, because e.g. they depend on a third-party C library
> that is not installed, or depend on some other package that Hackage
> cannot build.

True, in that case, it's harder to avoid getting one email every time
you upload a new version.  We should still strive to have stuff build on
Hackage (e.g. installing C libs or fixing the ohter packages); if the
build fails for one of these reasons, you never know if it fails for
other reasons as well.

So, I'd *love* to get an email when my packages fail to build, but I will
accept that other people have a more sensitive relationship with their
inbox.  (I assume that the people who raise this objection - Max
and Yitzchak - belong in this category?  It's not entirely clear from
your comments, and I do hope we're not avoiding useful functionality
based on a purely *hypothetical* problem.)

Conrad suggested creating a mailing list per package, another option
could be to automatically post to a single maintainers list,
highlighting the package (and preferably also maintainer) name in the
Subject. A decent MUA could then up-score the more relevant messages.

I'd really like to see Hackage move to a continuous integration type of
system, where everything is automatically built and tests are run on
every submission.  If somebody works out the software infrastructure,
I'll volunteer CPU cycles.  Next hackathon?

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants