Apparently Gerrit sends a failure message every time it tries to merge a patch which has missing dependency. This can make tens of messages per day. Fortunately they do get into the same thread, so one can just skip over them easily.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
There's actually a discussion going on currently on the upstream list, repo-discuss. I've taken the time to weigh in.
In an ideal world, I think users should be able to customize what sorts of e-mails they get.
Chad, the ideal behavior is that it not send the latter emails at all, since nothing has changed.
If the dependency gets merged, then obviously it should do the merge. But I can't see why anyone would want useless emails that said "The same thing I tried before failed again, since the situation has not changed".
It's not supposed to repeat comments that are identical, but the logic's been a bit broken for some time. After we upgrade, I'm thinking of disabling the behavior (or at least set it to a much longer interval) until it's fixed to not spam people.
The spam is the same (comments & e-mail), and should be treated as one issue (hence the dupe).
I'm going to tentatively mark this fixed. If anyone sees it, please reopen and we'll look at it again.