[Python-Dev] Pull requests now have labels specifying what stage they are at

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri Aug 11 17:47:36 EDT 2017


I just pushed a change to Bedevere to help track what stage a pull request
is in. The stages are:


   - awaiting review
   - awaiting core review
   - awaiting changes
   - awaiting change review
   - awaiting merge

The "review" stage is for when a pull request has no reviews either
approving or requesting changes (this only applies to PRs not by a core
dev; all PRs created by a core dev are flagged as awaiting merge
immediately).

The "core review" stage is when a review has been done by one or more
non-core folk, but no core devs. The idea with the distinction is to
encourage people to help in doing initial reviewing of PRs who happen to
not be core devs since triaging issues and reviewing pull requests is the
biggest chunk of work in maintaining CPython.

The "changes" stage occurs when a core dev requests changes to a PR (a
non-core dev review will not trigger this). A comment will be left to this
effect with instructions for the PR creator to leave a comment saying "I
didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition" to signal when they believe they are
done addressing the reviewer's comments (there is also appropriate comments
to explain the quote along with an easter egg(s) :) .

The "change review" label means that the PR creator left the Spanish
Inquisition quote and so now the core dev(s) who requested changes should
re-review the PR. There will be a comment mentioning the core devs to this
effect so that they will get a proper GitHub notification and they can
check the label to see if the PR  creator believes they are ready for
another round of review (compared to now where you have to hunt around in
the PR to see if it's ready for another review).

The "merge" label means the PR has received an approving review from a core
dev and so it should be ready to go.

Now when any state change happens to trigger these labels, any preexisting
"awaiting" label will be cleared and the new one set. But removing or
setting a label manually won't trigger an action, so in this instance you
can override Bedevere manually until some later event occurs which triggers
an automatic update.

One thing I do want to call out is that it's now more important that core
devs leave appropriate "approved" and "request changes" reviews through the
GitHub UI instead of just leaving a comment when they approve or want
changes to a PR, respectively. Not only is this necessary to automate this
part of the stage labeling, but it also visibly exposes in the GitHub UI
the review state of a PR.

I'm not backfilling the open PRs as it's more work and I don't want to do
said work. ;) But as PRs are opened, reviewed, etc., things should slowly
trickle their way through the various PRs.

I should mention this is the second-to-last "intrusive" workflow change I
have planned to introduce some new aspect to the workflow (the last one
being a status check for a news entry after every branch has been
blurbified). After these two changes land, everything else I have planned
is just touching things up (e.g. the CLA check becoming a status check
instead of a label, touching up CONTRIBUTING.md, etc.). I think some other
people have plans to improve things as well, but at least my TODO list of
"radical" changes to our workflow is almost done!
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