[RFC] Allow merging via PR comments

[Mousius]

Hi @driazati,

I think this is a great improvement to help empower more people to contribute without having to synchronise with those with certain powers in the project across many timezones and organisations, as well as providing some much needed consistency on commit messages. Could this implement some simple lint rules for commit messages as well to try to support better overall messages? Considering the new Commit Message Guideline work that @gromero is doing.

We also need a cooler bot name than tvm-bot to be competitive in the merge bot market though.

@driazati

It will then check that the PR has been accepted by a valid reviewer / committer in its latest version.

I think this would be just Committers who could give a “merge-able” approval in the ASF? Reviewers would continue to provide assistance to Committers though, potentially future bot commands could help with highlighting that.

@driazati

• Something to maintain - this would be another piece of automation for us to build. Given that we have dedicated resources for the CI though, this is manageable.

Is there an “off-the-shelf” version here that works as we’d like? As @comaniac suggested, this is fairly common in other projects.

@driazati

@areusch

committers have reviewed and one wants to approve the PR but not merge it until the others have looked the PR over.

One of the main reasons of this work would be to explicitly remove this step, though it makes sense to still limit the ability to those that have already interacted with the repo in some way (i.e. they aren’t a first time contributor).

Isn’t the issue here that we want a PR to be active for a certain period where people can review it before it being merged due to some people working across different timezones etc? I’d prefer something minimal so as to encourage progress rather than creating new ways to hold up PRs, the Committer takes responsibility for approval either way. We can always follow a PR with another PR using the same bot

I also don’t think we should limit who can ask for a merge given it’ll only function if the last commit has a positive review from a Committer - they’ll have to start the workflows anyway for a new person in the repo.

@driazati

@areusch

Suppose we want to approve but hold a PR until another PR lands

This is something we just need to rely on the community for, with mostly good faith actors this workflow would work fine with comments like accepted but please don't merge until #1234 merges to keep the bot simple and understandable.

This should be an edge case, given patches should be self-contained and work in isolation; we should aim to encourage that level of discipline If necessary, we should default fallback to human interaction to resolve these more complex scenarios.