Re: RFC: Github PR bot questions

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021 at 10:18 AM Konstantin Ryabitsev
<konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> - My general assumption is that putting this bot on github.com/torvalds/linux
>   would not be useful, as this will probably result in more noise than signal.

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

And no, it's not just about proper sign-off chains. It's about things
like "proper one-line header". It's about things like "actual
whitespace and proper line breaks and indentation for quoted text
etc".

I see way too many projects that have a mess of unwrapped (or purely
auto-wrapped) wall of text for commit messages. I think some of the
"do commits in the browser" workflows seem to think it's ok to have
reflowed text and not have proper formatting of quoting (error
messages) etc.

Yes, yes, that happens in emailed patches too (I actually spend time
on emailed patches making sure 'dmesg' snippets are cleaned up etc -
not everybody does), but it happens a _lot_ in other projects that
don't have quote the same quality requirements for commit messages
that we do.

               Linus