[jbosstools-dev] Why so many "jenkins build is failing" emails?

[Nick Boldt]

When a build fails, Jenkins attempts to find the cause of the failure by 
looking at the commits that went into a build since the last time it was 
blue (successful).

HOWEVER, *there's a bug in Jenkins right now is making this lookup 
process search in git instead of svn* for the commit history (and 
therefore the list of committers to email).

Because *we commit into svn*, not git, that lookup *ALWAYS fails* and 
the search for "committers who broke the build" returns a 
NullPointerException.

NPE = red (failed) build. But sometimes the failure is simply a bad 
test, which should make the build yellow, and we want to reflect the 
correct status.

Worse... if the problem's fixed and Jenkins is trying to send a "build 
is back to normal" email, it will report RED (due to the mail recipient 
lookup NPE) when it's in fact BLUE.

---

So, to work around this, instead of using the "send mail to individual 
committers who broke the build" option, I switched notification to 
everyone subscribed to this list for ALL the JBT 4.0 & JBDS 6.0 jobs -- 
not just the aggregate ones like we had in the past, but all the 
components too.

---

When the bug is fixed in Jenkins (or as we move jobs to use git instead 
of svn), I'll revert the configuration so that ONLY committers who broke 
the build will be notified, not the whole list.

---

In the mean time... you might want to set up a  filter on your mailing 
list reader to suppress notifications of failing jobs for which you're 
not a committer.



-- 
Nick Boldt :: JBoss by Red Hat
Productization Lead :: JBoss Tools & Dev Studio
http://nick.divbyzero.com