Maintainer notification script (was Re: Aggressive ports removal)

[Adam Weinberger]

> On Aug 29, 2020, at 22:37, Pau Amma <pauamma at gundo.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2020-08-30 00:50, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>> [major snip]
>> This is a serious issue that we’ve been dealing with for a long time.
>> I’ve advocated very strongly for a script that automatically notifies
>> the maintainer (+/- ports@?) when a port is marked BROKEN and/or
>> DEPRECATED. Community notification is always a good thing, and it
>> opens the door for objections and discussion. Nobody has written such
>> a script, but I would be thrilled to help deploy such a script if
>> someone writes it.
> 
> What would be needed in such a notifier? I imagine it would be called by the post-receive hook in the central git repository-to-be for ports. I'm not very familiar with python or git hooks, but perhaps contrib/hooks/multimail/post-receive.example could be extended or modified and made into (part of) a post-receive hook to:
> 1- check whether one or more port Makefiles were modified;
> 2- get from the port Makefiles in step 1 those that have a changed/removed/added BROKEN(_[a-zA-Z0-9_]*)?, DEPRECATED, or EXPIRATION_DATE;
> 3- email each MAINTAINER= address (for the ports coming out of step 2) using a suitable template.

In my mind, commit hooks are there to perform tasks that the repo cannot function without, as fragility in a commit hook could bring down the whole tree. But perhaps I am giving the commit hooks too much credit here?

Perhaps we could sweep the tree at certain intervals and notify maintainers when a new entry is added.

# Adam


—
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org