Well, I thought about these 10's of emails too; probably hackage could
send an email when a new broken build arrives but only if there were
no 'unresolved' broken builds before this one; or probably an email at
the first broken build and a weekly email reminding "you've got some
unresolved broken builds".
As for missing C libraries: could cabal probably integrate with the
native package manager (apt/rpm/..) and ask the user whether to invoke
it to install these libraries in case they are missing? However, this
is not a solution for Windows since there's no native package manager.
An easier solution might be to add a (flag-dependent)
"broken-build-message" field to .cabal files, where authors could put
useful info to be printed when a build breaks, like, "have you
installed libpcre?" or "please see troubleshooting.txt".
/me promises to do some cabal tickets from the 'easy ticket list'
after the last exam
2009/1/15 Duncan Coutts
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 09:49 +0300, Eugene Kirpichov wrote:
Would be nice if after a failed build cabal asked whether or not to upload its log immediately, and (on the hackage side) this led to an email being sent to the maintainer.
It should not be quite that synchronous but yes that's the general idea.
Packages can fail to install for many reasons that are not the fault of the package author, for example missing C libraries. Also, I think maintainers would not be pleased to receive 10's of emails per day! :-) I think in practise it will have to be opt-in for package authors/maintainers and it should only send aggregated information (like "it appears not to work on windows with ghc-6.8").
Duncan