Arvados

Problem:

• Users need to find out when a bugfix they care about is deployed on a cluster, so they can continue their work and flag us if the issue is not fully resolved.
• Any kind of push mechanism to report this (e.g., sending mail or updating bugs) has the potential to get spammy quickly as we deploy more clusters.

Observed:

• The API server has a full copy of the arvados git repository, to make our own Crunch scripts available to jobs.
• The API server knows the git hash of its own code.

Proposed: an API method that takes a bug number. It queries a Redmine installation (at a configurable location) and reports whether its own git timestamp is more recent than the time the bug was closed. This is an effective heuristic for server-side issues; and given our current deployment strategy (where we pin the version of all Arvados packages across all hosts on the cluster), it's should be good enough for client-side issues, too, to resolve the problems outlined.

There should also be some kind of interface for this. Something in Workbench would be cool. A command-line tool seems like a reasonable complement or alternative.