Re: Maintainers should announce build-related changes in their modules

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 22:40, Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:

On Thu, 2019-09-12 at 19:14 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:

On Thu, 12 Sep, 2019 at 19:08, Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:

That sounds like something people are going to forget to do. Would it be possible to use computers to automate this?

It's software: anything is possible.

As to whether we can automate this **right now**, the answer is: no.

I'm not going to block on a feature that may or may not appear in Gitlab's enterprise edition and then may or may not be backported to the community edition we have. Of course, enterprising hackers are strongly encouraged to work on that.

The link to the GitLab EE issue was illustrative, not definitive. If it solves the problem, a cronjob which polls every module’s `/meson.build` and `/meson_options.txt` files every 30 minutes and uses sendmail to send you an e-mail about changes would work.

If you're volunteering to write that script, make it work for Autotools and CMake, then feel free.

Of course, a script polling your meson.build files doesn't help us in the slightest when you add a dependency on libfoobar, hosted on a random repository on GitHub, from a specific tag or branch, but only built with a set of specific options because you rely on an optional feature.

Not every single problem we have in building a complex project like GNOME can be solved by a script; if it were, we wouldn't need maintainers, and y'all would have been replaced by a script already.

Ciao,

 Emmanuele.

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