When setting up a completely fresh repo for Skara, it's not possible to get issue or mail notifications on the very first commit (which is usually adding .jcheck/conf).

The first commit is what's creating the first branch, so NotifyBot finds a new branch. The only commit on that branch does not have any parents, which causes the bot to bail out and not notify about the new branch. Even editing the notify history file isn't possible, as there is no valid value to put there that will cause the bot to find the single commit and notify for it. The logic always assumes there is a parent.

The complicating factor here is that we often configure Skara bots for existing repositories with an existing (potentially long) history. When doing that we do not want the bot to notify on every existing commit. The current behavior is actually tailored for this case, where we would rather want the bot to start notifying on any new commits only. Maybe we could check if the repository has exactly one (or maybe a few?) commits and in that case, start notification from the beginning, but otherwise keep the current behavior.