[Dev] Rotating build sheriff duties?

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:50 AM 12/7/2005 -0800, Andi Vajda wrote:
>If the tinderboxes are smart enough to know who the last committers were 
>and are smart enough to know that the build or tests are failing they are 
>obviously smart enough to send mail or otherwise ping on irc the allegedly 
>guilty parties. If they do it in mail, the tinderboxes should also send 
>the complete stack trace of the failure, something that can be a pain to 
>extract via the browser interface.

Focusing on implementation issues here, the current way that hardhat runs 
tests would probably make it difficult for an automated process to extract 
just the failure.  I think we could ultimately fix that too, but it's a 
more invasive change than just sending an email with some highlights from 
the log and a link or two.  We could create a completely external tool to 
do failure notifications that way, whereas smart error extraction would 
probably require some changes to hardhat.

Not that I think it shouldn't be done in the long-term, it's just that it's 
not the lowest-hanging fruit here.  Just having *some* kind of failure 
notification pushed to the committers would be a big step forward here over 
the current need to poll the status page.  (And not just because it would 
eliminate rotating sheriff duty, but because it'd be more convenient for 
developers, too.)