Testing-watch emails

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org>
> On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 12:05:07AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:

>> I have now a frst draft of a status-change mail system running.  it
>> works from the archive mirror on merkel, [...]

> Thanks for running with this.  Ideally, we would get this integrated on
> ftp-master, so that the mails could be triggered by britney rather than
> being done post-hoc; this would also let us associate package removals with
> comments from britney hints files, so that they could be incorporated into
> the mails.  If you're interested in making this happen

I am. Also, I have gotten a couple of complaints that people want the
mails to be more easily procmailable. If they had katie instead of me
as sender, they would have a better chance of matching people's
existing recipies for routine Debian notices.

It seems that integrating it *properly* would involve learning Python,
(which won't happen this week or next), but less might work, too.

> I'll be happy to give you any info I can; though tbh, if I
> understood this part of the system very well, I probably would have
> written a patch myself already. ;)

I think that doing post-hoc analysis (perhaps on Sources files,
perhaps on cached HeidiResult files) is still a more robust
architecture than trying to hook into britney's actual
decision-making. Britney itself doesn't remember the hint comments
anyway, we'll need to do some heuristic parsing of the hints files
separately to extract removal reasons.

-- 
Henning Makholm                            "Manden med det store pindsvin er
                              kommet vel ombord i den grønne dobbeltdækker."