Re: skip email on transient build failures

Hi David,

Interesting idea. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how you would persist such 
state as the # of failures across email publishers (because each build 
creates new objects). I'm sure there's a way, but it doesn't jump out at 
me...might need some new way to do it.

If you take a crack at writing a patch to provide this feature, please 
be sure to create a Jira issue with your patch attached (and of course 
holler if you get stuck).

Another thought: would it be easier to built some kind of retry into the 
steps with the intermittent failures? eg: retry the repo fetch?

Dan


Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:02:04 -0400
Subject: [Cruisecontrol-user] skip email on transient build failures
To: [email protected]


It's not uncommon for our CC builds to fail for transient reasons
(usually it is timeouts from Maven central repository, despite our use 
of Artifactory).
Without changing anything, the next rebuild succeeds. The developers 
then need to
investigate the failure, which takes time and most often is wasted because
the transient problem is gone.

I propose an enhancement to the <email> publisher to only send mail
on the second consecutive failure. That is, do not email on the first
failure and if the next build succeeds, do not send a success email.
Only send mail if a rebuild after failure also fails.

We already use

                reportsuccess="fixes"
                spamwhilebroken="false"

I think a new child element would be the most flexible configuration, i.e.

   <ignoreFirst>emailaddress</ignorefirst> (cardinality 0 .. *)

would allow some recipients to have this filtering and others
receive the failure email unconditionally. An optional attribute
would allow someone to ignore the first n failures:

   <ignoreFirst n="2">emailaddress</ignorefirst>

thanks for considering.

-- David J. Biesack, SAS SAS Campus Dr. Cary, NC 27513 www.sas.com (919) 
531-7771

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