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What about the well-intentioned but dubiously helpful PR from someone who just doesn't know what they're doing? What if that were to catch on and you have swar

What about the well-intentioned but dubiously helpful PR from someone who just doesn't know what they're doing? What if that were to catch on and you have swarms of overlapping non-programmers submitting PRs? These slippery slope arguments are a bit silly. If you're running an open-source project, you can either accept PRs or not, and if you're accepting them, you can review the code and approve it or not approve it. A PR from a bot is the same as a PR from anyone else, it's either helpful or not helpful. It's not currently a problem, and it's too early to speculate about worst-case future scenarios.

DanBC 14y ago
> It's not currently a problem, and it's too early to speculate about worst-case future scenarios. Is that what they said about SMPT and spam?
hackinthebochs 14y ago
>A PR from a bot is the same as a PR from anyone else, it's either helpful or not helpful. You're missing a key point here. The difference between PRs from bots and people is that there is a balance of effort on the part of the person giving the PR that bots do not have. PRs take time and effort to evaluate on the part of the repo owner. A PR from a person has a higher chance of being a meaningful change as the person had to spend their own time and effort to offer it. There is also a consideration of the nature of PRs from bots. They will necessarily be of a certain class of actions and in the vast majority of cases be low effort, low impact changes. Having these compete with PRs from actual people is not a good direction for github. Also, the slippery slope retort is getting tired. We can and should use our reasoning skills and historical precedence to evaluate likely usages of new rules (you'd be negligent if you didn't). In the case of bots, the possibility of having repo owners spammed with low value changes is enough to disallow it.
mistercow 14y ago
>What if that were to catch on and you have swarms of overlapping non-programmers submitting PRs? Humans can easily look at the existing pull requests and see if their work is redundant. Bots can't. And as hackinthebochs said, human-submitted pull requests involve effort which limits them. It's not really a slippery slope argument. It's more an application of what we can see having happened with bots in the past. Email spam for legitimate offers is, after all, just about as annoying as email spam for scams.
- thomaslangston 14y ago
  Why can't bots look at existing pull requests?
  - mistercow 14y ago
    They can, but it's unrealistic to think that they will do so one percent as intelligently as a human.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    They can, but it's unrealistic to think that they will do so one percent as intelligently as a human contributor.
jchrisa 14y ago
A "mark as spam" button would work as long they could reflect the user's preference toward bots in general.

DanBC 14y ago

> It's not currently a problem, and it's too early to speculate about worst-case future scenarios. Is that what they said about SMPT and spam?

hackinthebochs 14y ago

>A PR from a bot is the same as a PR from anyone else, it's either helpful or not helpful. You're missing a key point here. The difference between PRs from bots and people is that there is a balance of effort on the part of the person giving the PR that bots do not have. PRs take time and effort to evaluate on the part of the repo owner. A PR from a person has a higher chance of being a meaningful change as the person had to spend their own time and effort to offer it. There is also a consideration of the nature of PRs from bots. They will necessarily be of a certain class of actions and in the vast majority of cases be low effort, low impact changes. Having these compete with PRs from actual people is not a good direction for github. Also, the slippery slope retort is getting tired. We can and should use our reasoning skills and historical precedence to evaluate likely usages of new rules (you'd be negligent if you didn't). In the case of bots, the possibility of having repo owners spammed with low value changes is enough to disallow it.

mistercow 14y ago

>What if that were to catch on and you have swarms of overlapping non-programmers submitting PRs? Humans can easily look at the existing pull requests and see if their work is redundant. Bots can't. And as hackinthebochs said, human-submitted pull requests involve effort which limits them. It's not really a slippery slope argument. It's more an application of what we can see having happened with bots in the past. Email spam for legitimate offers is, after all, just about as annoying as email spam for scams.

thomaslangston 14y ago
Why can't bots look at existing pull requests?
- mistercow 14y ago
  They can, but it's unrealistic to think that they will do so one percent as intelligently as a human.
- mistercow 14y ago
  They can, but it's unrealistic to think that they will do so one percent as intelligently as a human contributor.

jchrisa 14y ago

A "mark as spam" button would work as long they could reflect the user's preference toward bots in general.