[asterisk-dev] GitHub: Side Note: What makes us "special"?

[Dennis Buteyn]

On 4/4/23 21:53, George Joseph wrote:
> Every open source project, CI/CD system and SCM system has its own 
> quirks.  Asterisk and GitHub are no exception. :) Here's some 
> background, most of which is just informational for you but caused us 
> some head scratching and will probably continue to do so.
>
>  1. Very few GitHub projects have multiple simultaneous release
>     branches as we do and GitHub has no built-in cherry-picking
>     functionality.
>  2. For very valid security reasons, GitHub limits the permissions of
>     workflows triggered by PRs submitted from forked repositories to
>     read-only.  Otherwise anyone could fork the Asterisk repo and
>     submit a pull request that changes the workflow that's about to
>     run for thiat PR.  OK, it's not quite as easy as that but it is a
>     concern.
>  3. Some of the automations we need, like simply reporting
>     test completion status on the PR, require write access to the PR.
>  4. We could add Asterisk community developers as collaborators to the
>     repos which would give them additional permissions but that
>     becomes an administrative overhead for the core team.  Besides...
>  5. GitHub's most restrictive level of collaborator access (Triager)
>     allows a user to manipulate the PRs and issues belonging to
>     other users which is probably not a good idea.
>  6. You know how you can add a "regate" or "recheck" comment to Gerrit
>     today and have Jenkins re-run the tests?  Well, GitHub doesn't
>     need that because it has the ability to re-run jobs right from the
>     UI.  However, when we were thinking about the cherry-pick process
>     we thought we could trigger it using the same mechanism...just add
>     the comment and the process would kick off.  Unfortunately, unlike
>     Gerrit/Jenkins, if you have a job trigger on a comment, it'll
>     trigger on EVERY comment even if the keyword isn't present in it. 
>     That's just a waste of resources and it would flood the job
>     history with crap.  Then we thought...
>  7. In my earlier email I mentioned an Asterisk core team member
>     having to add a label to kick off the cherry-pick process.  Well,
>     that started with "Let's have the user add labels to kick the
>     cherry-pick process off".  Except...  A user who is not a member
>     of the organization can't add labels even to their own PRs and issues.
>
> That's just some of the background that's driving the process and 
> development of the workflows.
>
> Speaking of workflows...  If you want to see the workflows and 
> actions we've written so far, check out the asterisk/asterisk-gh-test 
> (the .github/workflows directory) and asterisk/asterisk-ci-actions 
> repos.   If you're experienced with GitHub workflows, feedback is 
> appreciated.

I've noticed quite a few GitHub projects use bots aka apps to perform a 
variety of tasks such as automatic tagging, triggering builds, adding 
test results and so forth. GitHub provides a fairly rich API which 
should cover most of the issues mentioned. Aside from the usual 
automation, I've also seen bots perform specific actions by writing 
instructions as comments. Hundreds of existing apps can be found on the 
GitHub marketplace, which should give some ideas as to what can or 
cannot be done.

The Gopherbot seen here <https://github.com/golang/go/issues/59450> for 
example is adding tags and mentions to related issues. And this pull 
request <https://github.com/golang/go/pull/59301> was automatically 
imported into Gerrit for code review and closed after being successfully 
merged. Source of this bot can be found here: 
https://github.com/golang/build/tree/master/cmd/gopherbot

References:
https://docs.github.com/en/apps/creating-github-apps/creating-github-apps/about-apps
https://docs.github.com/en/rest?apiVersion=2022-11-28
https://github.com/marketplace

-- 
Dennis Buteyn
Xorcom Ltd
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