Mercurial notifications

[Mark Reinhold]

The Mercurial gates for JDK 7 have now been open for almost two weeks.

Once the initial flurry of pushes for the jcheck configuration file that
was needed in each and every repository blew past (sorry about that),
we've seen 61 pushes of actual code into the various JDK 7 development
forests.

The forests were initially configured to send push-notification messages
to the primary -dev mailing lists of the appropriate Group(s).  This
seemed like a reasonable starting point, on the assumption that if a
Group has Members who regularly push code into a JDK 7 forest then
they'll want to (and arguably should) be aware of every push into that
forest.

Some have expressed the concern, privately, that this results in people
receiving too many messages in which they're not actually interested.
There are (at least) a couple of ways to deal with this:

  - People can filter the incoming messages (look for the X-Hg-URL
    header, which points back to the repository for which the
    notification was generated); or

  - We could create an additional list for each forest and arrange to
    send Mercurial notifications to those lists only.  People could
    then subscribe to those lists, or subscribe to the appropriate
    per-repository RSS feeds (broken at the moment, but to be fixed
    soon), or live in peaceful ignorance.

So, what do people think?  Should we create separate per-forest lists for
Mercurial notifications, do nothing, or do something else?

BTW, when gatekeepers integrate changes from their local forests into the
master forest (jdk7/jdk7) then the resulting notification messages will
be sent to jdk7-dev at openjdk.java.net.  Integrations take place at most
two or three times a day [1], so this should not result in an enormous
amount of traffic.

Also BTW, if you want to see every single push notification then you can
subscribe to jdk7-changes at ojn.  It does make for interesting reading ...

- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/builds/