[meta] Sending pullrequest and/or issue notifications from Bitbucket to the mailing list

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi,

Currently, the Kallithea mailing list does not receive e-mails when
new pull requests for Kallithea are created on Bitbucket, nor when
comments are added to such pullrequests, nor when issues are created
or commented on.

In my opinion, to grow a healthy Kallithea community, this should be changed.

The first question is therefore: what type of notifications should be
sent to the mailing list?
- new pullrequests
- comments on pull requests
- status changes of pullrequests

- new issues
- comments on issues
- status changes of issues

My preference would be to send e-mail both for issues and
pullrequests. If there is a fear that it would render too much
e-mails, I would give priority to the pullrequests.



The second question is how to achieve it. Having looked at the
Bitbucket admin interface, here are some ideas:

- for issues specifically, Bitbucket has an option to send
notifications to a mailing list. This is available in the Admin menu,
under 'issues', 'Mailing list'.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Setting+email+preferences+for+an+issue+tracker

- another approach is the use of Webhooks.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Manage+Webhooks
It allows to have a web service receive triggers when something
happens on the repository. This service should be hosted somewhere by
us, and can send e-mails to the list. The triggers receive some
payload with the event information, see
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Event+Payloads
This has the full flexibility but requires some server listening on
the notifications and then sending e-mail. Is this an option?

While webhooks are in theory what we can use, it would be great if
there were another way. For example, the 'Watch' principle in
Bitbucket apparently only sends mail to the primary e-mail address. If
it were able to define an alternate e-mail address that can receive
watch notifications, then we could set up a separate account with a
non-primary e-mail address set to the mailing list, and set up watches
for that.
I'm hesitant about creating such an account with the mailing list as
primary address for security reasons: I imagine password reset and
other mails are sent to that primary address.

If someone knows about better ways to achieve some mailing list
integration with Bitbucket, that would be great.


Thanks for your input.

Thomas