Stuart,
In reality though, this emailer *doesn't* tell you if the checksum checker is working. All it tells you are the supposed "results" the last time the checksum checker ran (and it also tells you that the *emailer* itself is running). But, if the checksum checker fails behind the scenes (and throws an error), the Emailer will NOT notify you of the error, instead it will just report "0... possible issues". (Trust me, I've had this happen before -- the checksum checker was throwing an IOException in the logs, and the emailer kept returning "0... possible issues" over and over again, which was incredibly misleading).
So, while I understand your rationale, it's unfortunately not 100% accurate. The CheckSum Checker Emailer, as it stands, does NOT check for errors in checksum processing. So, an email that states "0 Bitstreams found with POSSIBLE issues" could either mean: (a) everything's perfectly OK, OR (b) the checkSum checker is throwing an error and no longer even *checking* bitstreams.
Therefore, in order to actually let the sysadmin / repo manager know that the checksum checker is *working*, you need to be analyzing the [dspace]/log/checker.log.YYYY-MM-DD files. Those files are what will let you know whether the checksum checker is actually working correctly or not.
I think it'd be nice to *enhance* the Checker Emailer to notify the sysadmin / repo manager of errors, but that's something we should submit a different ticket for.
In general, I feel the Checksum Emailer needs a lot of improvements to make it more trustworthy. This is just a tiny bug fix which tries to make it a little less annoying to enable. I agree however, that ideally, we could enhance this emailer to be smarter in the future -- have it occasionally let you know things are "ok" and also have it notify you when there are actual errors in checksum processing.
If you or others disagree with this particular bug fix (PR #442), I'm fine with leaving it until 5.0, and hoping we can improve on it in the meantime.
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