squash and merge, license documentation, "size" documentation

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,


On 18 August 2018 at 12:47, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Aug 2018 22:15:38 -0700 Eitan Adler wrote:
>> On Fri, 17 Aug 2018 at 06:44, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> >
>> > As many of you are aware, I merge a significant fraction of the
>> > pull requests these days. A few requests to make it easier, these
>> > three things on their own represent a surprising fraction of the
>> > communication I need to have with contributors:
>> ...
>>
>> As an FYI, unless the contributor disabled the option, you can push
>> the branch of the PR. This way you could avoid some of the back and
>> forth.
>
> It's a heck of a lot more work to do that, and I often have fairly
> little time for this, sadly. It's much easier to tell someone (for
> example) to add the size field than it would be for me to check out
> the repo, edit, and push.
>
> What I was hoping was that "port lint" would catch more of these
> things (bad license names, missing fields, etc.) so that people would
> know on their own that there was something wrong. Having a human
> detect these things isn't optimal anyway.

I totally agree with Perry on this.

The difference between fixing someone's PR vs. just accepting it is
enormous. Accepting a PR can be done by a single click on a mobile
phone while going for a walk :), while fixing it requires lots of
steps for which I always need a copy-and-paste cheat-sheet with quite
some commands. Fixing one or two is not a big deal, but fixing
thousand of them (which is probably not an overestimation of how many
Perry merged) adds up.

We definitely need automatic way for feedback to users submitting PRS
to make sure that:
- proper checksums are included (could be done with lint)
- only valid licences are listed (could be done with lint)
- maintainers are listed with both email & github handles
- create a warning in case multiple commits touch the same file(s)
(with explanation that this could be a valid case)
- create a warning if commit message doesn't pass some super basic checks

(MP bot could also say thank you after PR gets merged - not sure if
this is a good idea, but ... :) :) :)

Mojca