Effectively communicating tree closures

[Finnur Thorarinsson]

I feel we used to be more effective at communicating tree closures and various tree statuses in the past, but I feel that lately people just leave automatic tree closure messages up for long periods of time, leaving everyone to wonder if the problem is known and if someone is looking at it (and then multiple people spam the person involved with "did you know you broke the build?" messages).

With that, I'd like to draw your attention to a short chapter I added to the sheriffing document, copied below for your convenience. 

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Effectively communicating tree closure

It is considered best practice to annotate the tree status with information about what is known about the status of build failures. For example, automatic closure messages such as...

   Tree is closed (Automatic: "compile" on "Webkit Mac Builder" from 12345: f...@chromium.org)

... should be changed to:

   Tree is closed (compile -> foo)

... to indicate that committer 'foo' has been notified of the problem and is looking into it. Once a fix has been checked in, sheriffs often use status:

   Tree is closed (cycling green)

... to indicate that a fix/revert has been checked in and the tree will likely be opened soon.

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Thanks for listening. Tune in next week for how to make a quilt out of buildbot console view printouts.

-- Finnur.