Re: email backend for fedmsg

[clime <clime7@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2020 at 20:40, Nicolas Dandrimont <olasd@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2020, at 13:06, clime wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > Ad. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/07/msg00377.html -
> > fedmsg usage in Debian.
> >
> > There is a note: "it seems that people actually like parsing emails"
>
> This was just a way to say that fedmsg never got much of a user base in the services that run on Debian infra, and that even the new services introduced at the time kept parsing emails.

Hello Nicolas!

Do you remember some such service and how it used email parsing specifically?

I am still a bit unclear how email parsing is used in Debian
infrastructure, don't get me wrong, I find it elegant but from what I
have found (e.g. reportbug), in the beginning there is an
email being sent by some human which will then trigger some automatic
action (e.g. putting the bug into db). So it's like you could do all
your work simply by sending emails (some of them machine-parsable).

So do you have the opposite? I do some clicking action somewhere and
it will send an email to a certain mailing list to inform human
beings? Or let's not just clicking but e.g. `git push` (something that
you can still do from command line).

Do you have: I do some clicking action somewhere and it will send an
email to a certain mailing list where the email is afterward parsed by
another service which will do an action (e.g. launch a build) based on
it?

Thanks
clime

>
> > [...]
> >
> > So fedmsg would become a tiny wrapper over email that would just
> > serialize and parse json data to and from email messages and check
> > signatures.
>
> The only native fedmsg producer in Debian was mentors.debian.net. Other events were generated by various email parsers connected to mailing lists (debian-devel-announce, debian-bugs-announce).
>
> > I am asking because I like the idea of distribution-independent
> > infrastructure message bus that this project had.
>
> Yes, it was a nice idea.
>
> > [...]
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Nicolas Dandrimont