At 02:58 PM 12/7/2005 -0500, Mike Taylor wrote:
Notifying people by email works in a perfectly sanitized world where
everyone is responding to their emails in a timely manner, but it just
doesn't work that way in real life. heck, even now I sometimes have to
email people two or three times, send them pings on IRC and once had to
phone someone to get them to notice that their change had broken the build.
I just don't get why this is such a hard or tedious task - don't devs
already have a "best practices" list of things to do:
- check code status to make sure you have latest build
- verify your code works with latest tests
- verify you are only checking in code that you want to check in
and so on - why not just add "check tinderbox in X minutes" to make sure
your change hasn't broken the different OS related builds?
I agree, and certainly I try to do it. However, it sure would be more
convenient for me if the Tinderbox notified me instead of me having to poll
it. Real life has a way of interfering; I might plan to check in an hour,
and then something comes up and I don't look for 3 hours. Apparently, it
sounds like some people don't even try, and that's bad, but what can we do?
One possibility: send the second or third email for an unfixed consistent
failure (that hasn't had a note added to the bulletin board) to the Dev
list, where the persons who failed to monitor their email will now be
publically shamed, with their failure permanently recorded in the archives
for all to see. Currently, the people you contact are only shamed in front
of you (and maybe whoever's on IRC), and you're usually way too nice to
us. :) And it'll become obvious to everybody who these mysterious
noncompliant people are, because their failures will be blanketing the Dev
list.
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