Hi all,

Thanks for the interesting feedback - some clarifications and comments inline:

On May 4, 2010, at 9:08, Bert Leunis wrote:
> I follow this list, next to the userlist. Getting rid of the hudson messages 
> would be great. The jira messages are useful sometimes and are not bothering 
> me.

I should have clarified this earlier, but there might be some confusion in all 
messages in this thread about what a "Hudson message" is:
- emails sent by Hudson directly (build failed, build back to normal)
- comments left on Jira by Hudson

The latter are discussed below; regarding the former:
* they should be considered more "important" than Jira. If a build fails, all 
lights should go red, sirens should start screaming, and developers enter panic 
mode. In reality, this does not happen, but those alarms should be taken 
seriously and taken care of *immediately*. (and the more our code is tested, 
the more this could happen, and the more seriously it should be taken care of. 
I believe than better tested code would lead to less of these alarms, though, 
as test failures could appear sooner, before developer commits code)
* there is some unnecessary noise when multi-module builds, such as 
"magnolia-main-trunk" fail and come back to normal, because each module is 
somehow considered a different project and emails are sent for each (cfr 
yesterday evening). I'll try to see if there's a solution for this.

On May 4, 2010, at 9:38, Philipp Bärfuss wrote:
> I back this. The creation of a ticket, commenting and resolving a ticket, are 
> quite important events. Before hudson started to comment after each commit, 
> everything was on the right level for me. Having isolated discussion on jira 
> and not in the list is actually what we want to have.

IMO, the comments Hudson leaves on Jira are as relevant as regular comments, 
but it takes some getting used to on the part of the committer. If there are 
many commits to fix one issue, it's indeed creating noise. If there's few 
commits with a meaningful commit message, it's very relevant. What I often (try 
to) do, at least for "small" issues, is resolve "silently" (no comment) and let 
Hudson comment for me. My commit message explains how the issue was fixed, and 
provides relevant information for the change log (which I would otherwise have 
to type again in the "resolution" comment)

> Can we filter just the comments added by hudson, and maybe send them to a 
> more verbose list? Are they redundant to the svn list and should not sent to 
> any of the lists?

Yes, it would be possible to filter out the comments left by Hudson on Jira, 
but nothing trivial afaik: either by customizing the notification component of 
Jira, or the Jira plugin of Hudson (and having a specific Jira plugin too). Not 
really an option.

There is some *overlap* with the svn mails, but no redundancy. The comments 
Hudson leaves on Jira serve two purposes:
* notify that work was done *on a given issue* (context)
* what was done and how (message)

The svn emails on the other hand give no context regarding the issue (all you 
get is the issue ID - sure you can click and see), but you do get a complete 
diff, making it easy for reviews. Some commits span over several issues, and 
some commits are not associated with any issue. A code review tool like 
Crucible might provide the best of both worlds, but until then, I don't think 
we can just get rid of either.

> The trick is to separate the relevant from the daily noise. 

If you're still talking about comments left by Hudson on Jira, the trick is how 
the developer works, see hints above. And yeah, there will be cases, for "big" 
or "long" issues, where there will still be noise. Temporarily turn your email 
off, or create temporary rules, if this is really an issue ;)

On May 4, 2010, at 8:04, Jozef Chocholacek wrote:
> 
>> * do you consider this automated traffic useful ? (why?)
>  No - as a mere mort^H^H^H^H developer of plug-ins/extensions I would
> expect some developer discussion here, and not automatic messages to be
> 95% of the content (some weeks even 100%). If I am interested in some
> JIRA issue, I can "subscribe" to its notifications in JIRA.


This point of view makes a lot of sense indeed for developers not working 
directly on the core. 

On May 3, 2010, at 18:40, Ruben Reusser wrote:
> maybe if the dev list signs up for a digest of the other automated list we 
> would have both worlds.

Yep, this kind of goes in the same direction as Jozef's thoughts; see below for 
a possible solution to that.

On May 4, 2010, at 10:38, Danilo Ghirardelli wrote:
>> 
>> Inconsistently, our Subversion emails are sent to a separate list. So, I'd 
>> like to ask everyone a few questions:
>> * do you consider this automated traffic useful ? (why?)
> 
> Yes, at least jira issues and comments are interesting to follow. Hudson 
> messages are (at least to me) not so useful.
See above.

>> * would you subscribe to an extra list, containing only automated emails ? 
>> (Jira, Hudson, ...)
> I would subscribe a separate Jira list, but not the hudson one if it's 
> separated from jira.
Direct Hudson mails, or comments left on Jira by Hudson ? (see above)

>> * if you're subscribed to the svn list, would you rather keep that a 
>> separate list, or would it work just as well for you to have this traffic 
>> merged into the new dev-tools list ?
> 
> As I stated before, I'd like to keep this separated. How many tools do you 
> have that generates automated mails? Four? Five? They are still a number for 
> which is possible to have a list for each tool. So I can subscribe jira and 
> svn and leave out hudson (or whatever I don't think is useful for me).

Good point. So far, there are Hudson, Jira and SVN mails. As seen in the above 
discussions, "Hudson leaving comments on Jira" seems to be considered like an 
extra channel by most. In the semi-near future, we might have notifications 
from Nexus (Maven repository) as well.


On May 3, 2010, at 18:18, Boris Kraft wrote:
> all automated traffic can go to one list. I assume that those that are 
> interested in them know how to handle an email filter/rules.
> 
> All "real" discussions should be here on the list.
> 
> Now obviously, it sounds simple but it is not: many discussions actually 
> happen on jira.

That's probably calling for a separate discussion/decision, but in my opinion 
they should not. Jira is for reporting issues, and fixing them. As I often try 
to remind: "if you think about Jira, think changelog". What I want to see when 
I look at Jira is what's been fixed (or will be) for a particular version, and 
if/how/when certain issues I'm interested have been/will be fixed. I don't want 
to read through developers debates.
Now I have the feeling this happens in Jira in part because it's easy to refer 
to such discussion: "See MAGNOLIA-2999", which is something we can't do with 
our current lists (because the only way that vaguely works is googling for the 
subject and hoping the nabble topic shows up).

> I feel that if these could be more mail-like, we could leave them here. Here 
> I think they should look and behave like normal emails, with the ability to 
> reply to them (from email to jira). I assume that is not possible right now, 
> but basically I would appreciate the relevant jira traffic if it would behave 
> like email.

The email-to-jira feature actually exists (or existed?) in Jira, but the 
experience I have with it isn't so satisfactory. It works for occasional Jira 
usage/commenting, but otherwise creates a lot of noise in the comments (think 
headers, quotes and signatures in email - they're normally filtered out... 
"normally")

----------------------
Status so far:
1) The split is inevitable. If only for archiving purposes: look at 
http://old.nabble.com/Magnolia---Dev-f650.html. This is ridiculous, it's 
impossible to see actual discussions, and it creates a virtual barrier people 
won't jump, thus preventing them to join in discussions, which is a pity. Or 
they're simply mislead into thinking this is a "tools-only" list.

2) I'm thinking about switching to RSS for all generated emails. On the plus 
side: well, it makes my life easier, and as a developer, I'm free to subscribe 
to whichever feed I want, use custom feeds (maybe you're only interested in 2 
modules, and we can't have one list per module, obviously), combine them 
(Yahoo!pipes)
I have two concerns with this: a) it's less intrusive than emails. This is 
generally a good thing, but I'm a little afraid the switch would take some time 
to sink in everyone's brains and we would all be sloppy for a while, forgetting 
to "check the news". b) more pragmatically, the load this could generate on the 
server (if anybody has any experience with Jira's RSS feeds for example, please 
make yourself known!)

3) I've seen some project send regular (weekly?) summaries of issues reported 
in the last period. This could maybe be implemented and sent to the actual 
dev-list, as a general information "status" messages. Example: 
http://old.nabble.com/-jira--Subscription:-Open-Fortress-Issues-td28149610.html 
Whether we use RSS or a separate list for automated traffic, this might be a 
good thing to have to keep everyone informed on a regular basis, while avoiding 
tons of traffic they don't need.


More thoughts ?

Thanks,

-greg




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