Comment 6 for bug 307988

I spent an hour or so with the same problem. Wanted to report back on what I've found.

My situation is pretty similar: I'm running CentOS 5.2, and I'd like emailed commits to be required, so I'm looking to add them into the branch.conf on the master branch server. Since CentOS 5.2's /bin/mail does not support -a, and particularly because I need UTF-8 capability, my branch.conf started out with the following:

post_commit_to = <email address hidden>
post_commit_sender = <email address hidden>
post_commit_mailer = smtplib

I'd be using the local mail server, so I didn't specify any of smtp_ configuration values. On a client machine, I checked out the repository over bzr+ssh. I then created a file, bzr add'd, then bzr commit'd. No mail was sent out. There was nothing reported in the .bzr.log specific to the email plugin (just that it was searching through the plugin directories). "bzr version" reported 2.0.2, "bzr help email" and "bzr plugins" both asserted that the email plugin was added (which I did server wide, so "bzr checkout https://launchpad.net/bzr-email; cd bzr-email; python setup.py install").

Chatting in #bzr about this had me experiment with setting smtp_server to "localhost" and also "localhost:25". Commits from the client machine still didn't get emailed out. Finally, I found this bug report, and added:

post_commit_push_pull = True

Did another commit from the client machine (literally, a "bzr commit" - not a push, not a pull), and my emails are now being sent out. I'm tentatively setting the status of this back to "confirmed". Why? The documentation currently asserts that I SHOULD NOT need to use post_commit_push_pull to do what I want - I wouldn't consider this an "appropriate" configuration (per comment #1). But, at least in this case, it appears that it is.