Re: eshell-defgroup. Do we really need this?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Ted Zlatanov writes:

 > SJT> Romain's right, you don't need confirmation.  If a clean build breaks,
 > SJT> it's broke.  What to do about it is another question.
 > 
 > Builds can break for many reasons, some local (e.g. disk full).  Why
 > bother many people with a false report?

Because they don't happen much in practice on well-maintained 'bots,
which is what you want.

 > It would condition them to ignore truly broken builds.

Excuse me, but isn't the problem that they already do??  (Yes, I know
that's specious.  It's still true.  Fix the bigger problem first. :-)

"Snappy Answers" aside, and acknowledging that broken builds are taken
very seriously by the maintainers, there's a real problem in the Emacs
build system.  XEmacs and SXEmacs see *way* fewer "broken build"
reports, and when we do, the response is almost always that the
responsible developer pipes up with "oops, my bad, fixed" within 24
hours.  I've *never* seen the kind of "Did you wait until the goat
died?  You can't start the build before the sacrificial goat is dead!" 
threads that are so common on emacs-devel.

 > That's my concern.

There are sufficient broken builds in Emacs that that is not a worry.
If there is a 'bot spewing because of disk full, sentence the 'bot
owner to some public service like reading the entire Collected Works
of Richard Stallman (including the source code to all his programs)
out loud at the main gate of Microsoft.

If and when the rate of disk full reports reaches 10% of the rate of
genuine breakage, start forwarding them as bug reports to buildbot.

Also, it shouldn't be hard to construct a filter that recognizes
such and pings the 'bot owner.  If you have access to the Mailman
pipeline, it can easily be installed in the list config (ie, without
risk to other Mailman lists) and set up to ping only interested
parties, and not forward it to the list.