post a message on conflicting PRS

[ericLemanissier]

No description provided.

[madebr]

This would be useful!
I've got some questions about the intended behaviour:

1. What should the bot do when a conflict is resolved?
2. What should the bot do when a previously-commented-on issue has new conflicts?

Having the same behaviour as conan-center-bot would be the most verbose and clearest to the pr creator.
But this can lead to an overload of comments.
Editing previous comment instead of creating a new one is the densest but can be overlooked.
Anyway it would be nice to hide older comments (and hope @conan-center-bot will adopt this behaviour).

Maybe you should create a new @EricLemanissierBot user account and let the bot run using that account.
Same way as @Croydon does with his @CroydonBot .
That would avoid the risk of the bot mixing up your messages with its messages.

[ericLemanissier]

I'm exploring API, but unfortunately it does not seem to be possible to hide issue comments : https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/rest/reference/issues#update-an-issue-comment. The closest solution would be to delete the issue comment

[madebr]

FYI, instead of using requests, you can also use pygithub.
I've used it in the past and found it pleasant to use.

[madebr]

I've searched on this and there exists a graphql api at https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/graphql
This API supports minimization of comments
pygithub only supports api v3, I think graphql is api v4

[madebr]

Congratulations on creating the bot @ericLemanissierBot :D
conan-io/conan-center-index#2867 (comment)

I think there is a grammar error: There seems to be
Or re-word the comment.
e.g.

I detected other pull requests that are modifying the same recipe:
- ...
- ...
- ...

This message was auto-generated by a bot.
Please complain at https://github.com/ericLemanissier/conan-center-conflicting-prs/issues

[ericLemanissier]

Thanks for pushing me on this one. As a first step, I made sure that there is only one message of the bot per PR, and the message is updated in case the conflict changes.
The problem with doing something when the conflict is resolved, is that the bot needs to have some durable state in order to know that there was a conflict before. Currently, the only state we have is the content of the table in conan-io/conan-center-index#3571 (comment), and I'm not very confident that parsing this table is a good table. Do you have an idea ?
Thanks for the info about graphql. I didn't know about it yet. I'm not sure I want to dive into this just for the "hide comment" feature though :/. It seems a very significant shift from REST api

[prince-chrismc]

I absolutely hate this 😃 please stop spamming my inbox!

[madebr]

Ok, we got the first complaint 😄
So I guess we should edit the comments.
Ideally, @conan-center-bot would tag the pr's.

You have some options with retaining state between actions:

1. use github actions functionality:

• pro: you use github actions all the way, file oriented
• con: very github focused, unclear to me where the data is stored

2. store the data, encoded as e.g. json/yml, in a comment somewhere and edit the comment every time

• pro: the data is there for you to manually check
• con: no complex data structures (but that is not a problem here)

3. store the data in a (orphaned) branch. This combines the pros of 1 and 2 without the con of 1 and 2.

[ericLemanissier]

The 3rd option seems good, but to be honest, I don't think I'll take the time to learn the graphql api (which I know nothing about), implement a database file, and make the bot maintain this database, when the only improvement is to hide some outdated messages :/

[madebr]

I just got 14+ mails from your bot which is a bit annoying.
The database should, imho, only contain the following:

• repo: conan-io/conan-center-index
• issue number: 2867
• comment: 729036085

Then it knows what message to mutilate.
You can simply store it as a json/yml.

Or you could iterate through all comments on an issue and look for messages made by your bot.
Then no state should be kept.

[ericLemanissier]

Sorry about the round of emails 40 minutes ago, it was an error from me. It should not occur again. I changed the bot to not modify posts so that it does not generate unnecessary notifications each time the CI runs