There have been complaints that it is not possible to follow requests that have been originated by oneself, which can result in the weird situation that one does not get information what happened to a request. I fixed that by adding a new subscription called OBS Request Author to the Hermes start page that informs you about all changes to a request originated by you. All people who already had a subscription on the request change notifications have been automatically subscribed. The subscription can of course be removed on the Hermes page if it is not wanted.

Another problem was that people who are subscribed on Build Failure with the _mypackages special filter were flooded by mails. That happens because the _mypackages filter thinks a package belongs to you if you’re either maintainer of the project or package. Since this is not what maintainers of big projects want I created a _mypackagesstrict filter that only fires if one is really the maintainer of the package. To enable this fix, please go to the Hermes Expert page to edit your subscription to BIULD_FAILURE. Edit the filter to set it to special value _mypackagesstrict.

I hope that makes Hermes again a bit more useful for you. Please let me know what you think!

So let me introduce Hermes a bit.

Hermes is a system that helps it’s user to get back the decision about who is sending a message when and in which way. Using Hermes it is up to the user to decide if a message comes through at all, when and in which way. Hermes is going to be the central part of notifications in the openSUSE Buildservice.

Digest messages will be supported through Hermes. That means that messages (mostly automatically generated) of the same type coming regularly can be combined to one message combining all the bits. For example, imagine a notification about a package build fail. It might not make sense to send lets say 50 of them a day due to numerous rebuilds on different platforms that failed. It seems to be much more efficient to combine all these 50 to a digest message that lists all of the 50 fails. However, it’s users choice in Hermes.

The other important feature of Hermes is choice in the way of delivery. It is up to the user in which way the message comes through: Mail, RSS and jabber notification are already implemented in beta stadium, others may follow. It’s users choice based on the message type when and in which way the message is delivered.

The backend already has some code in it to notify Hermes. I hope I will be able to make let’s say some RSS feeds or mail running this week, especially for the submit requests. That would be another step into collaboration with the buildservice.

And since I seem to talk a lot about Hermes these days, Robert was cool enough to come up with a very cool logo for the (still little) Hermes. Do you like it? I think it is awesome – kind of 1960’s aircraft company

Thank you very much, Robert!

More about Hermes to follow…