New github integration with ROS Discourse

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We’re trying out a new plugin for Discourse:

I have configured it to give badges for contributions to the ros/rosdistro It went live overnight and I think it will be updated nightly. In this way it will be a proxy for maintainership.

I also tried enabled the Github Linkback capabilities on

ros/*
ros-infrastructure/*
ros-visualization/*
ros2/*

To try out the link back if people like it we can fill in more organizations or turn it off if it generates too much noise.

As an example I could link to https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/23624 and hopefully it will get a reference back to here.

I haven not turned on the auto permalink rewriting but that’s something we could also consider doing but I’d rather train our users to use good permalinks rather than force it in case something is appropriate to be non-permalinked.

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Perhaps you could update the bot account’s gravatar image so it’s more recognizable when skimming through comments. How about the ROS logo with the word bubble used for the discourse logo on the top left here?

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Or perhaps use a different GH account.

It’s rosbuild right now.

That account has no information in its GH profile, nor a recognisable avatar, which confused me when I happened to come across a link-back.

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Good idea I’ve created a dedicated account for this integration and set the profile image.

Testing integration with a random PR: https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosindex/pull/221

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Perhaps changing the first sentence from

This pull request has been mentioned on ROS.

to

This pull request has been mentioned on ROS Discourse.

would make it clearer/less vague (because “mentioned on ROS” doesn’t mean much).

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Yeah I noticed that too and changed it as you proposed.

The slight drawback is that it’s the “title” field for the whole site. So all email notifications are going to have [ROS Discourse] now instead of [ROS] in the subject. But I think the clarity is reasonable and it will make anything quoted or forwarded be much more traceable.

For example my email header for your message vs the one from gavanderhoorn

Screenshot from 2020-02-06 14-42-55

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This is awesome. Although out of curiosity, could there be a way for the discourse notices to appear as streamline events in the github ticket timelines, as opposed to a full blown comments? That might help alleviate the bot from being too spammy, and timeline events don’t trigger subscriber notices, but perhaps such notices of cross posting is desirable in this case?

I think I’ve seen such notices before with CI and DCO integrations?

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I don’t think that there’s an option for that in the plug-in right now. But it seems like it should be possible via the API. Maybe it would make sense to comment once and any additional mentions go into the timeline.

You could make a feature request at https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-github/99895

Or of course open a pr on the upstream repo if you want to dig in.

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Posting to the timeline would indeed be very nice and reduce the notification “spam” significantly.

This could also be a nice compromise.

It would require some work and a PR. Probably a post in the discourse/discourse-github thread first, as issues appear to have been disabled on the plugin’s repository.

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I also support this approach.