Issue Tracker Helper

[silamon]

Alternative for and as suggested in home-assistant/frontend#21664

Completely untested. 😃

[joostlek]

Just as an FYI, you know that there is a saved reply feature in GitHub?

[frenck]

That is a good point... this is maybe more fit for saved replies instead. A bot isn't the most personal way either.

[silamon]

No, not really. Good thing to find out this way.

I still think it's a good thing to merge. Too much time is spent triaging issues that don't belong to the issue tracker, even though there are guidelines to where to go if you have an issue related to that. For frontend, they don't even check off the checklist labels. Saved replies are also a personal thing, while these messages are only for a specific repository and of use for more maintainers.

[joostlek]

Maybe it's a good idea to take a step back and check how we can improve triaging overall.

• Have the bot autodetect if an issue form is fully filled out and if not, tag the issue and have it close early if not updated
• Automate the rest of the triaging like telling the user they should retest in the latest version if their reported version isn't the latest.

I do agree that labels that end the triaging flow (thus closes the ticket) could be useful, for example the "already-fixed" message to tell the users it's already on stable (or maybe also let the user know it's fixed on dev, and the next time frontend updates, it will be fixed (which is also annoying since its not as standard as the core releases)). But on the other hand, if someone opens an issue for a bug that has been fixed (and sometimes that's easy to spot) only having to tag it and then have the bot post a message and close it, can feel a bit dismissive. As in, it can come across as "oh he didn't even look at my issue >:(". And then a saved reply may be a bit more human (although I have been accused of being an AI before).

Some thoughts about saved replies:

• I think saved replies allow you to tweak the message to your own style, I prefer to sound a bit softer in my comments. And sometimes a part of the reply isn't relevant. I once wanted to add the functionality of this PR for performance issues where the first line said "open a new issue and choose profiler as integration". That works for existing issues where you find out it's a performance issue, but not for new issues where they already found that out.
• Maybe we can have a repo/gist for the org where people place a copy of their saved replies so others can easily find and use them. This way we can bootstrap people with saved replies, so they don't have to find them used and copy paste them.

[joostlek]

By the way, don't see this as "I don't care about triaging, good luck copy and pasting". I also like to triage every so often to make sure we don't have 10 issues for the same problem and to just know what's happening in the world.

I do like to discuss triaging and how we can improve that, I think @mib1185 also has some thoughts about this as he's also a common triager :)

[frenck]

From a pure functional perspective, using labeling to trigger replies and actions, is kinda misusing labeling IMHO.

These labels are now added to indicate a response, not the categorize the issue or pull request. I think that is wrong.

[joostlek]

Right, you have a point there. Although you could argue if an already fixed issue is a category. (I'm also still undecided about that)

[silamon]

I agree with the label use. With this PR, the labels also remain.

Still, it would be great to have a good message that informs the user, without having to keep everything in sync.

[mib1185]

I always would like to have some project provided saved replies and found there is an ongoing discussion (or user feedback) https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/4974 about adding it to github.

Using labels to let a bot write a reply and maybe close the report feels also wrong to me, but for this case just bot commands (like @home-assistant close duplicate #xxxxxx or @home-assistant close repo frontend or @home-assistant close fixed 2024.8.1) could be helpful to add useful comments with links to docs or the correct repo or the duplicated issue or the fixed release 🤔

[mib1185]

some more thoughts about the bot commands - we could distinguish between closing or just commenting

commands:

• @home-assistant close <message>
• @home-assistant comment <message>

<message> is something of:

• duplicate #xxxx it is a duplicate of #xxxx (link the issue)
• repo <REPONAME> wrong repo, report it to <REPONAME> (link the repo)
• fixed <VERSION> already fixed in <VERSION> (link the release)

[joostlek]

I like the idea, but at that point you are already commenting, so might as well use a saved reply.

OTOH, I also notice that I am sometimes very short, I just say Duplicate of #x and close the issue. The only benefit I see with this is that we can add messages to provide more context to those short things. Like a "there's already an issue open for this issue with the same cause, yada yada, move to that issue please". But that might as well just be a saved reply as well.

[mib1185]

IMO the problem with saved replies is, that each one has to write its own saved replies, which leads to different quality of context contained in the reply - for me i always try to add doc-links for things like "restart in safe mode" or "provide state details from dev-tools state tab" or "...wrong repo ... please report to REPONAME"

[joostlek]

But that's why I proposed a repo or gist to store these. We can even have some people who are good at writing have a look at them

[mib1185]

in the best case, the feature to provide saved replies per repo (especial this approach) will be implemented by github 🤞 🙈
Having a repo or gist with saved reply templates is much better than nothing and would already help to improve the quality of context of triage comments 👍

[joostlek]

I think that would be the ultimate solution to automatically bootstrap everyone with the right saved replies etc