Re: RFC: Github PR bot questions

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 01:24:52PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Yeah, I've had to turn off all emails from github because it's too
> noisy. Github also makes it very easyt to "invite" people to be team
> members, whether they want to or not, so I'm a "member" of random
> projects. There needs to be some way to make this _very_ much opt-in,
> not "anybody can do anything whether the target is ok with it or not".
> 
> I do think that having a way to generate patch series would be good,
> but I really really hope your robot would have
> 
>  (a) some limit on sizes
> 
>  (b) check that the commit messages are well-formed

I'm hoping that these 2 will be handled by Github pre-flight CI tests before
the pull request is even given the status "approved" and processed by the bot.
It's much easier to separate meatballs from the flies before they leave the
sausage factory. :)

> I've seen a lot of github code that doesn't have the Linux kernel kind
> of "good commit messages required".

Heh, and then there are pull requests like this one:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/779

It's a single commit that changes 44,000 files, so at least it would be easy
to catch this with pre-flight checks so the pull request never receives the
"approved" status.

In other words, I am fully aware of a lot of potentially negative outcomes of
this work, and I hope we'll be able to add sufficient anti-abuse measures so
it doesn't create useless work for anyone on the receiving end of the bot.

-K