movermeyer

This bot was exclusively applied to repos that were not mine.

Thanks for reporting this. Firstly, I am sorry for the inconvenience of receiving a broken pull request.

I have looked into the pull request and discovered that this is a variant of "Bug #4" from the blog post. It happens when the third-party renames their forked repo. At this point, the names don't line up and my bot doesn't realize that the two repos fork to the same location.

I have manually fixed my merge request for your repo and will be writing a script to look for others that might have had a similar experience.

Sorry once again.

The total amount of time to review one of these pull requests can be estimated at < 30 seconds per repo. 30s * 1000 repos = 8h20m. Hardly thousands of hours.

But yes, this was a particularly trivial problem to tackle. It was meant to be a stepping stone to a truly useful bot that I was working on. However, that has been put on hold.

FWIW, the maintainers themselves gave lots of positive feedback on the project.

A project I was working on was a much more useful bot. The number of affected repos for that problem was over 35,000 (although 95% of the value from fixing would be gained by only fixing the top 3,000 repos, when weighted by popularity)

The task of verifying correctness of a pull was much more time consuming than this one. Even if it only took 30 seconds to verify (optimistic), that's 290 hours. Which isn't necessarily all that much for an organization of verifiers (or Amazon Turk), but it is a lot for an individual.

Maybe that should be the cost. But perhaps some things you might be fine with letting a bot do (after manual verification of a statistical sampling, and thorough testing).

The project is currently on hold.

Yes, the bot made broken pull requests to some 35 repos before all the issues were ironed out. As a maintainer of those repos, I would be annoyed at these 'corrections'.

For my part, I manually corrected all of them and apologized to the maintainers for any inconvenience. The corrected pull requests were accepted, and the bot went on to submit correct fixes to several hundred other repos.

There's always the opportunity for bugs, but once they were ironed out it was able to happily submit correct fixes for hundreds more. I think that makes the idea worth something.

Thanks. I've fixed it.