Feature request: "subscribing" to tickets of specific ports

[Rainer Müller]

On 2013-03-20 14:03, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> When someone submits a ticket, the maintainer gets CC-ed (if not by
> submitter, by the first one who sees that ticket). That is fine, but
> that excludes anyone else who might be interested in following
> maintenance of that port.

Automatically assigning the maintainer would be nice as well, but that
requires a Trac plugin nobody volunteered to write yet.

> Ideally I would like to subscribe to email sent to, say,
> wxWidgets at port.macports.org or
> someportwithoutmaintainer at port.macports.org and if:
> - one would have to CC wxWidgets at port.macports.org instead of its maintainer
> - cron job of after-commit hook would send emails to that email
> address for any changes to that port in SVN
> then it would be a lot easier for some of us (without the resources to
> follow the whole macports repository) to help with patches, ideas, ...
> for exactly those ports that are of interest to us.
> 
> One could have other pseudo-port addresses like port.new@ (for
> everyone interested in hearing about submissions for new ports),
> port.nomaintainer@ (for anyone interested in seeing tickets for
> unmaintained ports where the chance of nobody looking into report is
> higer), group.science@ (for all ports in a specific group),
> ticket.wontfix@ (for feedback of all tickets that won't get fixed for
> some reason), ... (those were just a few different ideas)

I am not sure whether a mail interface would be the right tool for this
kind of notifications. Also I don't know if any such system exists
already, so it would be much work to implement and deploy this. However,
Trac has builtin support for ticket queries in multiple formats
including RSS feeds, which might already provide what you want.

Also many port maintainers use their wiki pages to create a list of
interesting tickets by using the TracQuery feature. For example, here is
mine (use Edit Page to see the source for this):

http://trac.macports.org/wiki/raimue

Trac offers RSS feeds for ticket queries and changes to specific paths
that should enable you to get notifications for the stuff you care
about. Check the links to the available formats at the bottom of each
page for the availabtility of a RSS feed. If you prefer email, there are
enough services and software to send mails for RSS feed entries.

The wiki page for Tickets has many ticket queries as examples. On each
of them, you find a link to the RSS feed at the bottom. Of course you
can customize them as well.

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Tickets

As an example, if you want to get all tickets matching "wxWidgets" in
the port field that have not been closed yet, use the following URL and
append &format=rss for the RSS feed:

https://trac.macports.org/query?status=!closed&port=~wxWidgets

https://trac.macports.org/query?status=!closed&port=~wxWidgets&format=rss

In the same way you can get changes to specific ports by subscribing to
the RSS feed of the appropriate path in the repository. Once again, you
just have to append format=rss here.

https://trac.macports.org/log/trunk/dports/graphics/wxWidgets?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy

https://trac.macports.org/log/trunk/dports/graphics/wxWidgets?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy&format=rss


> Ideally I would like to have a page somewhere on trac.macports.org
> where I would click the list of ports (or groups/pseudoports) that I'm
> interested in following. The maintainer would of course have to be
> subscribed, but everyone else with interest could join.

Of course it's more complicated to set up the notifications using RSS as
I described above. If we had a dedicated MacPorts Web Application (MPWA,
a web interface to list ports we are talking about for more than 5 years
now), it could offer such functionality in the form of simple checkboxes
to get notifications for a set of ports.

Rainer