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

[Max Bolingbroke]

On 2 November 2011 01:08, Diego Souza <dsouza at bitforest.org> wrote:
> The idea is simple: there are many different platforms that would be
> to expensive for one to support. So they ask the community for help,
> and then distribute the load amongst the perl community.

Duncan and co have been working towards something similar for a while
in the form of build reports. Cabal can submit a report of whether  a
build failed/succeeded and can opt to send a full log as well. The new
Hackage Server is capable of collecting these reports and taking
action based on them.

For example, you could setup Hackage server to detect patterns in
these build reports such as "80% of builds with GHC 7 are OK, but 100%
of builds with GHC 7.2 fail".

So far the infrastructure is there for creating and collecting
reports. I'm not sure whether reporting is turned on by *default* in
Cabal at the moment, which is something we might want to do. One thing
that I'm certain of is that there are no analyses that try to find
interesting patterns in the reports. If anyone is interested in the
issue that might be a good place to contribute and move things
forward.

Max