Maintainer notification script (was Re: Aggressive ports removal)

[Pau Amma]

On 2020-08-30 05:14, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>> 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?

Well, git help hook says:

    post-receive
        This hook is invoked by git-receive-pack(1) when it reacts to git 
push
        and updates reference(s) in its repository. It executes on the 
remote
        repository once after all the refs have been updated.

        This hook executes once for the receive operation. It takes no
        arguments, but gets the same information as the pre-receive hook 
does
        on its standard input.

        This hook does not affect the outcome of git receive-pack, as it 
is
        called after the real work is done. [...]

But perhaps I'm reading too much about the (lack of) consequences for 
failures from that specific hook into that.

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

Perhaps. How is the "comment on Bugzilla PR with commit log message" 
feature currently implemented? Or how will the git implementation work, 
if that's different?