Re-enable email notifications

[timokau]

To do this, we should:

• edit the nixpkgs release docs to indicate disable email sending for the first few evaluations, and a note to follow-up to turn them back on

and then, in order:

• make sure Hydra's notification queue and the mail queue haven't collected 1yr of email notifications
• if there are any queued emails (in hydra or on the server), drop them
• re-enable mail on the server

---

original contents below

As recently discussed with @vcunat and others on IRC, I think the hydra email notifications are very valuable and should be re-enabled. They were disabled in march after some spam issues. However without those, as a maintainer its hard to actually maintain a package (e.g. react to failures).

IRC logs:

12:13 <timokau[m]> Whats the status of hydra emailing maintainers? Was that just never re-activated after the spam? Or was the issue never fixed? 
12:23 <vcunat> Never reactivated AFAIK. 
12:24 <ekleog> oh :/ 
12:25 <timokau[m]> Can we just do that, or is there some work involved? 
12:27 <vcunat> Here's the line 
12:27 <vcunat> https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-org-configurations/blame/1dfde8a7cc461cacf338250a8a2eb53b0e0bd72c/delft/chef.nix#L54 
12:27 <vcunat> I don't know how Hydra's mail works on the inside. (e.g. if it will try to re-send those mails or something) 
12:27 <vcunat> niksnut: ^^ 
12:39 <niksnut> yeah it's disabled 
12:41 <vcunat> and expected not to cause trouble if simply re-enabled? 
12:42 <vcunat> My guess would be that the problem was that the *first* evaluation happenned with the feature on. On subsequent evaluations I'd expect only status changes would be e-mailed, but I might easily be wrong. 
12:48 <niksnut> IMHO email notification is not really worth it 
12:48 <niksnut> it causes more problems than it's worth, and most users don't care for it 
13:10 <LnL> can people without an account access the maintainers page on hydra? 
13:11 <LnL> doesn't look like it https://hydra.nixos.org/dashboard/daiderd@gmail.com#tabs-my-jobs 
13:13 <LnL> also not everything is in there 
13:16 <LnL> oh, meta.maintainers is broken on hyra Maintainer(s):not given 
13:16 <LnL> niksnut: ^ 
13:36 <timokau[m]> vcunat: niksnut: I think email notifications are very much worth it. How else are maintainers supposed to notice that their packages break? I think it is a very important step in minimizing hydra failures. 
13:40 <vcunat> timokau[m]: yes, I don't know a better way ATM. 
13:40 <vcunat> Most maintainers didn't react to the e-mails apparently, but if working reasonably reliably, the feature would seem a nice to have. 
13:44 <timokau[m]> Yes and it was working reliably until the spam. If that is still a concern, maybe some stupid rate limiting would reduce the risk. Or worst case we could at least make it possible to opt-in. 
13:44 <vcunat> I occasionally did get some weird messages for it for builds that were months old. 
13:44 <vcunat> s/for it/from it/ 
13:47 <aminechikhaoui> vcunat: I saw that also in our private hydra, I think it has to do with the attempted fix here but not sure https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/pull/566 
13:48 <aminechikhaoui> but it basically happens every time we restart the queue runner 
13:48 <vcunat> well first we need to fix filling the maintainer colon, as without that data there won't be anyone to send to 
13:49 <vcunat> (except for those messages: "your commit may have broken this build") 
13:50 <vcunat> Eh, not "colon", but I guess you know what I mean :-) 
13:51 <timokau[m]> In my opinion a few false-positives would be better than no positives at all :) 
13:52 <timokau[m]> I didn't know there was also that kind of message. Aren't that usually a lot of commits? 
14:14 <vcunat> It certainly happened commonly that there were many. 
14:14 <vcunat> > This may be due to 640 commits by ... (long list of authors) 
14:19 <timokau[m]> Those messages should probably be disabled. Or even better only sent if up to X commits might be responsible. 
14:32 <timokau[m]> And the problem with maintainers is that the parsing was just never adapted to the new maintainers format? 
14:54 <vcunat> It's possible. I don't know if anything was attempted. 

[timokau]

I've recently noticed some hydra failures in packages I maintained again. I think it is absolutely essential to be notified about those. Currently I've added those packages from the unstable channel to my system configuration to use their rebuilding as an indicator of a hydra failure.

Is there anything I can do to get this fixed? @edolstra @vcunat @grahamc

[Ekleog]

Same opinion here, would be great to have those back again!

cc @edolstra @vcunat (well, and @grahamc but currently speaking with him on IRC, so… :p)

[jonringer]

bump again, I would like to receive notifications :)

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/please-fix-all-packages-which-were-broken-by-the-qt-wrapping-changes/6444/25

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixosstag.fcio.net/t/ping-maintainers-on-breakage/3802/1

[roberth]

Above link is to a staging environment!

You'll probably not want to use it.