CI does not request review on some prs

[Shawn8901]

Hi, I am using an empty template, as I don't think the existing templates fits.

I was maintaining xanmod in nixpkgs in the recent past, and wanted to report an issue that the current ci does not request maintainers on prs

Prs without request

• linux_xanmod, linux_xanmod_latest: 2025-01-24 #376441
• linux_xanmod: remove shawn8901 as maintainer #378571

Here it still was working
#374627

I don't directly see what's the issue so I thought maybe a issue will help others if there is something with ci (maybe also other packages are affected)

[Shawn8901]

also other packages like proton-ge ( #378855 ) seem to be affected too.

If #376441 would have caused a ping, i would have bet, that its related to non-rebuild prs, but still idk what could be the issue.

But also something like #378867 seems not to have pinged.

[Shawn8901]

@wolfgangwalther sorry for pinging you directly, but if i saw it correctly in the history, you did a lot of maintainance on the ci the past weeks, do you maybe know what could be wrong here?

[wolfgangwalther]

also other packages like proton-ge ( #378855 ) seem to be affected too.

This one is odd, the maintainers.json is empty.

If #376441 would have caused a ping, i would have bet, that its related to non-rebuild prs, but still idk what could be the issue.

This one is because the "Eval / Tag" job was skipped, because the "Eval / Comparison" couldn't find a successful eval run on the commit from the target branch to compare against. I really dislike the fact, that the job silently succeeds in this case...

But also something like #378867 seems not to have pinged.

This one seems to be a different problem: GitHub Actions didn't run at all here. GHA has a lot of random failures the last couple of weeks, sometimes CI doesn't run at all. Also a problem, but likely nothing we can do anything about and unrelated to the maintainers.

Will further look into it.

[wolfgangwalther]

also other packages like proton-ge ( #378855 ) seem to be affected too.

This one is odd, the maintainers.json is empty.

Hm... but is it odd? It has probably behaved like this for ofborg as well. The PR doesn't cause any rebuilds, it's a straight refactor. So there are no "changed packages" to ping maintainers for.

[wolfgangwalther]

I think the only thing we can do here is to throw an error for the Eval / Comparison case, which I did in #378909.

[Shawn8901]

one of the xanmod prs was a rebuild of a kernel and did not ping anyone.
not sure why maintainers.json is empty but xanmod has maintainers.

[wolfgangwalther]

one of the xanmod prs was a rebuild of a kernel and did not ping anyone.

Yes, that was the case that I am "fixing" (i.e. throwing a proper error) in #378909.

not sure why maintainers.json is empty but xanmod has maintainers.

maintainers.json is a CI artifact, which is created in "Eval / Comparison". It was empty in that specific case, because no changed attributes were present. This was the refactor-only PR, which didn't cause any rebuilds. This is unrelated to whether the package has maintainers or not.

The maintainer ping doesn't operate on "changed files" alone. It takes "changed attributes" (= rebuilds) and "changed files" and draws a connection between the two. But if there are no rebuilds, there can't be any maintainer pings.

I'm not saying this is great, but I don't see an easy way to fix it... and it has been like that "forever", i.e. ofborg has been doing it like that.

[wolfgangwalther]

@infinisil do you see maintainer pings for changed files, which don't cause rebuilds, a possibility?

[Shawn8901]

and it has been like that "forever", i.e. ofborg has been doing it like that.

I honestly was sure that ofborg was doing that in the past but i rechecked old prs and seems that i remembered wrong. So that make sense. Thank you for also explaining how that works. I initially thought that it would take the commit prefix into consideration, as there was a function to let it select evals by it.

[eljamm]

Don't know if I should open a new issue for this, but xanmod maintainers are still not getting pinged (see latest PR logs).

[infinisil]

@eljamm PR with the fix: #381262