The buildbot.status.mail.MailNotifier class
(see MailNotifier) provides a status target which can send email
about the results of each build. It accepts a static list of email
addresses to which each message should be delivered, but it can also
be configured to send mail to the Build's Interested Users. To do
this, it needs a way to convert User names into email addresses.
For many VC systems, the User Name is actually an account name on the system which hosts the repository. As such, turning the name into an email address is a simple matter of appending “@repositoryhost.com”. Some projects use other kinds of mappings (for example the preferred email address may be at “project.org” despite the repository host being named “cvs.project.org”), and some VC systems have full separation between the concept of a user and that of an account on the repository host (like Perforce). Some systems (like Git) put a full contact email address in every change.
To convert these names to addresses, the MailNotifier uses an EmailLookup
object. This provides a .getAddress method which accepts a name and
(eventually) returns an address. The default MailNotifier
module provides an EmailLookup which simply appends a static string,
configurable when the notifier is created. To create more complex behaviors
(perhaps using an LDAP lookup, or using “finger” on a central host to
determine a preferred address for the developer), provide a different object
as the lookup argument.
In the future, when the Problem mechanism has been set up, the Buildbot will need to send mail to arbitrary Users. It will do this by locating a MailNotifier-like object among all the buildmaster's status targets, and asking it to send messages to various Users. This means the User-to-address mapping only has to be set up once, in your MailNotifier, and every email message the buildbot emits will take advantage of it.