It is possible to set the minimum number of lines changed required to
trigger a CLA check. There's also a minimum number of files, although
that seems less useful.
I find it is tricky with CPython. one line change in any .rst file, perhaps trivial.
One line change in *.py or *.c file, might not be trivial and require CLA, issue number, news entry and so on.
I guess if we do it this way, we need better guidelines of what requires CLA and what's not.
To see this in different perspective, if someone wants to propose a trivial change and then refused to sign the CLA, I think it won't be hard for us to find another contributor who has signed the CLA to make that change instead.
So I'm inclined to make this a requirement.
If you chose to use that, I would prefer to use our own instance to
manage the database ourself, especially make backup.
It would be bad for a legal point of view if suddently
https://cla-assistant.io/ instance goes away and loose all its data.
I've pinged Ernest about this. He said it is reasonable for The PSF to host an instance of cla-assistant. And he will look into it.
I also wonder though, instead of hosting it ourselves, can't we just keep daily backups of the signed CLA? It's basically a list of GitHub usernames?
Perhaps that would be an easier task than hosting and maintaining it.
Mariatta