Adding a bot to the project

[jbhoosreddy]

Okay so, feel free to close this issue if it's not a good idea for this place but.

In @facebookincubator, they use a bot to ensure new contributors signed the CLA. It may also do other things. I saw this here: facebookincubator/create-react-app#754.

I saw some nice other examples but I didn't look too deep into it. But if this is something other people find interesting, I'd like to investigate it and add it here.

Otherwise, kill this issue. 👍 @clarkbw

[wldcordeiro]

@jbhoosreddy I'd like it if we took this bot http://homu.io/ it's used by Rust/Servo if I recall and it's awesome! 😄

[jlongster]

We've definitely thought about adding bots when we need something automated, but so far we haven't needed to automate anything quite yet. Things we should automate at some point: filing an issue if the bundle.js file in m-c is changed, opening a PR to update m-c deps every week, etc.

Any specific workflow you want automated?

[wldcordeiro]

I don't think a PR bot like homu/bors would be useful till the project grew in size in some really significant way. But I would like the automation of m-c issues and upstream PRs.

[clarkbw]

@jbhoosreddy MOAR BOTS! I'm all about automation. If there's something you think a bot could help us with I'd love to take a look.

We don't require a CLA, but I like the idea of a "Welcome, I see its your first time here" kind of bot.

I also really like the facebook mention bot, we're not really big enough to require it. However I think its interesting to ping the people who most recently worked on that section of code. Of course for us it is most likely james or jason anyway. But that is changing. 😄

I'm planning on turning on greenkeeper, probably today, to handle dependency tracking.

[wldcordeiro]

If we added code coverage reporting I'd like a bot like coveralls, that'd be a nice one.

[jbhoosreddy]

I think all these are great ideas. We're definitely not at a level to require a bot which would handle complex interactions with users. Also, it's a great idea to have bots automate m-c issues (in the future).

I was thinking of initially adding a very simple bot which might not do too much. But as the project requirements grew at some point, we could add functionality to handle more functionality.

[jbhoosreddy]

@clarkbw maybe a bot which would see new users filing issues and respond with a comment pointing them to docs if they were interested in fixing it?

[jlongster]

@jbhoosreddy I have a bot idea for you: make it watch files that we've copied from mozilla-central and when it sees changes automatically open a new PR with the new files copied over. That might be quite complex, not sure, but boy would that be helpful.

[jbhoosreddy]

this sounds like a fun (non-blocker) project! I'd love to do it! I believe only files to track are the ones in public/js/lib/devtools @jlongster?

I'm actually making nice progress on this. If I come up with a good solution, we can look into review and deployment.

[jlongster]

@jbhoosreddy That's so cool! Yep, all the ones in public/js/lib/devtools. You can look at bin/import-deps.js which is how we manually do it right now. #790 is already open for a latest update and needs some fixes, but we'll get it in soon.

[jasonLaster]

Closing this as it became more of a tracking MC changes issue which we worked on outside of this issues

We're all in favor of bot overlords