Use bots for community health

[wooorm]

Rendered version: https://github.com/unifiedjs/rfcs/blob/bots-for-health/text/0000-bots-for-health.md

Mostly a conversation starter for how this could look!

[ChristianMurphy]

Thanks for pulling this together @wooorm!
A lot of interest and good ideas here.

[ChristianMurphy]

Are organization level saved responses a thing on GitHub? That'd be nice
The alternative, having a playbook document could also help.

[wooorm]

nope, only per user. So either a playbook, or done by a bot through comments due to labels

[ChristianMurphy]

platform/* can be found from the issue checklist;

could you clarify what you mean by this?

[wooorm]

we have platform/linux and such labels; in the issue templates we’re asking folks to describe their OS too.

[ChristianMurphy]

if someone is on an old Node, respond and close
that those aren’t supported;

Interesting 🤔
I like where this idea is going, what would be DX be like?
Would it be a checkbox? Would we try to parse the semver from the issue description?

[wooorm]

It’s interesting indeed, but now feels too structured for what issues are. Requiring folks to fill out Node/npm/etc is sometimes unrelated so I’d rather not list it all in the template.

Maybe a comment on the issue like this is more useful:

Hi @mention, could you confirm that you are using the latest versions of
packages?
The latest version published of this project, `remark-rehype`, on npm is v1.2.3.

you can use `npm ls` in your terminal to find what packages and version you have
locally.

If you are instead on an older version, your issue may already be fixed.
...

[ChristianMurphy]

area/* could be added to the issue title?

Could you expand what you mean by this?
Are you proposing structured PR/commit titles? Something like: https://www.conventionalcommits.org?

[wooorm]

Issue and PR titles at least, to make them easier to search, and make area more useful

[ChristianMurphy]

so PRs' titles would be prefixed with things like docs:, health:, test:, types:, etc?

[wooorm]

Yeah, it’s just one idea though, but might be useful!

[ChristianMurphy]

Nice, https://github.com/conventional-changelog and particularly https://github.com/conventional-changelog/commitlint have some good tools for parsing/analyzing commit messages (or PR messages).

[ChristianMurphy]

There are some options.
Many GH automations are built with https://probot.github.io
Which offers some flexibility on where/how it is hosted.
We could make these GitHub actions, we could also make this a GitHub app, or a script running on a server.

[wooorm]

Actions seems to be relatively nice for this, because:

• It’s fast
• It’s automatically authentication to change labels, post comments, etc
• GHs limits seem to be based per repo, of which we have a lot, but they each have low activity, so it seems we won’t reach thresholds.

See also:

• Probot vs. Actions: https://jasonet.co/posts/probot-app-or-github-action-v2
• Actions vs. Apps: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/creating-actions/about-actions#comparing-github-actions-to-github-apps

[wooorm]

An update: I’ve got an action working. It’s pretty fast: responds in 20 seconds.

Here is a response for when I remove an issue template:

In this case, I only filled out one section in the template:

When everything looks good, it’ll hide its comment.

[Jolg42]

Interesting live example of "TypeScript Bot" DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped#49408 (comment)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/changes-to-how-we-manage-definitelytyped/#what-pull-requests-can-be-merged-by-definition-owners

[wooorm]

Closing, bots have landed as a “beta” test, and gradually have been added to most places and work quite well. The feedback here has been super useful, but it feels weird trying to “backdate” what happened to a mergeable RFC!

Thanks folks!