QoL: PR bot to assist new contributors

[sktpy]

Goal of this discussion is to gather general sentiments and inputs regarding the idea. If maintainers agree that such thing can be helpful, I can proceed with further research and prototypes.

Necessity:
While our CI, local maven runs, etc. are great at identifying and reporting errors, bottom line is that all of this can be overwhelming to a new contributor, as I have noticed more often than not, maintainers have to point out CI errors, and provide general advice.

The problem with that thing is:

• For maintainers, it can deplete their time which I have gathered is very limited to begin with. :)
• For contributors, due to the asynchronous nature of the help, this can take a while.

The goal of such a bot would be to provide quick help with very basic issue, one at a time.

The bot can help with stuff like (but not limited to) to point out basic CI issues like: Commit message, Multiple commits, PR age, Spelling errors, PR not referencing any issue etc. General Tips like to run mvn clean verify, check for related PRs. adding documentation to PR etc.
The bot would be able to point out such issues, and provide solution for the same in a more human-like comment, one at a time.

Also, while we are discussing some QoL, I would like to gather how we feel about interactive form to help users with bug report/PR templates, helping:

• end-users/new-contributors, holding their hand one step at a time.
• maintainers, as there would be less chances of badly formatted bug reports and PR.

Note that these all our just very abstract ideas, I just want to first gather how do we feel about such stuff. Feasibility, technical details, all such stuff are not concern of this discussion.

[romani]

idea is good, but I do not see clear implementation of it. CircleCI tried to to make it and still not done, at least it is hard to make a use of it for now.
Reposting ERROR lines from CIs to Github looks simple solution, but might be noisy also.

[sktpy]

Thoughts? @rnveach @nrmancuso

[nrmancuso]

Thoughts from me:

• this is yet another tool to maintain
• how do we keep this tool in sync with whatever is happening in CI? We make frequent changes to our CI
• if messages in CI aren’t clear, they themselves should be improved
• if contributors aren’t willing to get their hands dirty, this bot won’t be able to help anyway

[sktpy]

this is yet another tool to maintain

True, maintainers would need to consider if the perceived benefit of this would be worth it for nurturing another tool based on their prior experience with dealing with the part it aims to help with.

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how do we keep this tool in sync with whatever is happening in CI? We make frequent changes to our CI

The ease of this will depend on the implementation, I cannot guarantee it atm if it will be a smooth or cumbersome process, but we will be only doing this for selective CI only, so that's something to go with.

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if messages in CI aren’t clear, they themselves should be improved

They serve their purpose well, but I guess there are few that I have come across that can be worded better to ease new contributors, will look into it and create an issue for the same if that's worth it.

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if contributors aren’t willing to get their hands dirty, this bot won’t be able to help anyway

From what I am able to observe, new contributors are probably not able to get it because some of it require a few clicks in the right places, and some need a bit of scrolling.
This is a valid point that we wouldn't be having this problem in first place if contributors decided to roam a bit in the wilderness of CI and hence I can see why pointing to the CI error might seem an exercise in futility.
If one can't handle the bread, expectations of preparing a sandwich is skeptical to say the least 😂, but due to it pointing to the solution for selective and basic CI issues, there is some hope.