One of the metrics of project health at the ASF is number of PRs and commits on projects.
Ours have been massively inflated by these scalabot and dependbot PRs. (dependbot is new, but I was already observing this just from the scala update bot). This isn't terrible, and presumably as other projects adopt this improvement to the SDLC all the numbers will adjust upward, with expectations adjusting upward similarly. I just wanted everyone to understand that "non-automated PRs" is perhaps a future metric of note, and that we're seeing an inflated number of PRs and commits and emails now due to these bots. I believe that these improve the quality of our software, and reduce maintenance burdens on the team, so I hope more projects adopt this. I just wanted everyone to understand that there are some odd ASF "community health" metric implications of this that I will raise in the next Apache Daffodil Board report, just to advise them that our project (like others) is experiencing this big flurry and new steady state, of automated PRs. I doubt this is news, but it's worth mentioning given that we're a small new project and the instant growth due to these bots is a one-time transient not reflective of (and in fact overwhelming) our organic community growth, which is non-zero, but slow. (I'm ok with it, thank you new contributors!) I am interested in people's thoughts about this notion of counting automated PRs separately from human-originated PRs. I am also interested in whether people find this flurry of constant bot activity disruptive. I admit I find it so. I am going to need to create email rules to segregate this email traffic into folders so they're not in my daily view, and I wonder if we need to have an informal policy that people aren't expected to respond/review these except but once a week/month or some such. Thoughts welcome. -mikeb Mike Beckerle | Principal Engineer [cid:5d17796e-a90b-49ae-aede-06b717ee9a7a] mbecke...@owlcyberdefense.com<mailto:bhum...@owlcyberdefense.com> P +1-781-330-0412
