Connecting to github community - Pywikipedia-l

5 May 2015

Hey,
Github has a huge community of developers that collaborating with them can
be beneficial for us and them but Wikimedia codes are in gerrit (and in
future in phabricator) and our bug tracker is in phabrictor. sometimes It
feels we are in another planet.
Wikimedia has a mirror in github but we close pull requests immediately and
we barely check issues raised there. Also there is a big notice in
github[1], "if you want to help, do it our way". Suddenly I got an idea
that if we can synchronize github activities with gerrit and phabricator,
it would help us by letting others help in their own way. It made me so
excited that I wrote a bot yesterday to automatically duplicates patches of
pull requests in gerrit and makes a comment in the pull request stating we
made a patch in gerrit. I did a test in pywikibot and it worked well [2][3].

Note that the bot doesn't create a pull request for every gerrit patch but
it  creates a gerrit patch for every (open) pull requests.

But before I go on we need to discuss on several important aspects of this
idea:
1- Is it really necessary to do this? Do you agree we need something like
that?
2-I think a bot to duplicate pull requests is not the best idea since it
creates them under the bot account and not under original user account. We
can create a plugin for phabrictor to do that but issues like privacy would
bother us. (using OAuth wouldn't be a bad idea) What do you think? What do
you suggest?
3- Even if we create a plugin, still a bot to synchronize comments and code
reviews is needed. I wrote my original code in a way that I can expand this
to do this job too, but do you agree we need to do this?
4- We can also expand this bot to create a phabricator task for each issue
that has been created (except pull requests). Is it okay?

I published my code in [4].

[1]: https://github.com/wikimedia/pywikibot-core "Github mirror of
"pywikibot/core" - our actual code is hosted with Gerrit (please see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access for contributing"
[2]: https://github.com/wikimedia/pywikibot-core/pull/5
[3]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/208906
[4]: https://github.com/Ladsgroup/sync_github_bot

Best