[Box Backup] Proposal: Merge pull requests automatically

Chris Wilson chris at qwirx.com
Mon Aug 31 22:13:57 BST 2015


On Mon, 31 Aug 2015, Chris Wilson wrote:

> We are going ahead with the migration to Git now. The official 
> repository is <https://github.com/boxbackup/boxbackup> effective 
> immediately.

And just hours later, we have our first pull request! Thank you Moritz 
Strube :)

At EuroSciPy on Friday, Peter Hintjens (of ZeroMQ) gave a very inspiring 
talk about how important the community is for Open Source projects, and 
what we can do to help foster a healthy and growing community. He has 
written about this in chapter 6 of the ZeroMQ book 
<http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:chapter6>.

He has several inspiring suggestions for how to achieve this, and one of 
them was to merge pull requests automatically if the tests pass. This 
solves the very real problem of good contributions languishing in 
pull requests and unmerged side branches, awaiting review that never 
happens, which is a waste and discourages contributors.

Even if we do this, there is plenty of time to review contributors' work 
after it is merged (all the time in the world), and now we can easily 
revert any change that causes problems. Because the history is public, and 
automatically merging their work demonstrates our trust in them, 
contributors will tend to set themselves high quality standards.

I think we are nearly in a position to do this, with tests being run 
automatically on Travis and James' build bots. I'm working on some code to 
check that status and automatically close pull requests, or at least 
comment on them, if everything is OK. So what do you think, is it a good 
idea?

Thanks, Chris.
-- 
_____ __     _
\  __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <chris+sig at qwirx.com> Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Ruby/Perl/SQL Developer |
\__/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU : free your mind & your software |



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