Suggestion: Assign maintainers to information extractors and develop notification system

[goggle]

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2017.03.02

I have

• At least skimmed through README and most notably FAQ and BUGS sections
• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

Purpose of the issue:

• Bug report (encountered problems with youtube-dl)
• Site support request (request for adding support for a new site)
• Feature request (request for a new functionality)
• Question
• Other

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Since information extractors tend to break often, it would be nice to have a service, which would help us to fix the problems as fast as possible. It's often a small thing to fix, like a test that fails, because the video source is not available anymore, or a regular expression error, because the hoster changed something on its site.

My suggestion is the following:

• We develop a system, where contributors can be assigned to certain information extractors.
• If a automatic test in an information extractor fails, or an issue beginning with [IE Name] gets posted, the assigned contributor of this information extractor gets a notification via email, so that he/she can fix the issue and open a pull request.

What do you think of this?

[dstftw]

I think this is pointless.

1. Very few of contributors ever maintain their extractors. Needless to say quite some part of them not even bother to fix review issues.
2. This will likely produce lots of false positives since this relies on many factors from temporary network hiccups at the build machine side to maintenance at the hoster side. As a result this will overflow the issue tracker with bogus issues.

[goggle]

Thanks for your reply.

1. I can somewhat agree with you. One reason for the issue that most contributors don't maintain their extractors might be, that they don't notice that their extractor is broken. With an automatic notification system they would at least be notified that something might be broken and get motivated to have a look at it again...
2. I think you misunderstood my suggestion here. The notification system should never open a new issue automatically, this would indeed lead to many false positives on the issue tracker. The notification system should only write a short email to the maintainer of a information extractor, if
   • the automatic testing suite repeatedly fails for a certain amount of time
   • a github user opens an issue mentioning the information extractor.

I cannot estimate if such a notification system would be worth the effort to implement it, but it might help maintaining the information extractors and their testing suites.

Are there other solutions to reduce the amount of the failing information extractor tests? How about strictly disabling broken information extractors, until someone fixes them?

[dstftw]

Are there other solutions to reduce the amount of the failing information extractor tests?

Maintaining and fixing them by hand obviously.

How about strictly disabling broken information extractors, until someone fixes them?

What is the definition of a broken extractor? One that has broken tests? No. In general you can't be sure until you manually investigate whether test fails due to a breakage, or it's a network issue, or a deleted test video, or something else.