Re: RFC: Github PR bot questions

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 10:48:59AM -0700, Ido Rosen wrote:
> I’d suggest limiting the feature set to automatically responding to GitHub
> PRs with a link to a tutorial on how to contribute patches etc.  Doing too
> much for them may create more harm than good in the long run because it
> removes the incentive to learn the contribution process.

I do understand that sentiment, to a degree; in fact, I often compare our
process to submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal. You can't just email
your napkin thoughts -- it must be formatted in a very specific way, list its
references in a very specific way etc, etc.

However, that is not a perfect analogy. Our code review process must also
allow for what is effectively a "report a typo" link. Currently, this is
extremely onerous for anyone, as a 15-minute affair suddenly becomes a
herculean effort. The goal of this work is to make drive-by patches easier
without also burying maintainers under a pile of junk submissions.

> An exception to this would be documentation patches and typo fixes: the
> GitHub web editor makes it very easy to edit documentation and other
> changes that don’t require compilation to test (e.g. spelling errors in
> comments, man pages, txt files, etc.).

Or it could be a tiny change in the driver string output, so I'm not sure it
makes sense to limit this to just docs (especially with many docs being
sourced straight from .c files).

-K