[che-dev] che-bot PR comments - annoying or useful?

[Michal Vala <mvala@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello team,

I'd like to raise an issue with che-bot commenting on every CI action
in all pull requests. Currently there are 3 CI jobs triggered after
each commit. For every one of them, che-bot writes a success/failure
comment. That's 3 comments for 1 commit.
I think it is more annoying than useful for several reasons:
 - it distracts the flow of the discussion and is more prone to miss
the important stuff in thread flooded by che-bot.
 - It's not so uncommon that one PR has over 100 comments, so it looks
like some disaster happened in the PR, but it might easily be author
incrementally committing the code.
 - if I do review, I receive notification for commit, followed by 3
notifications by che-bot in 'random' times. So I click on
notification, expecting to see updates from the author or other
reviewers, but I see che-bot comment, which is useless for me as a
reviewer. This is especially annoying if you're more involved in the
review and you're trying to watch more closely what is happening. It
basically makes github notifications more confusing and almost
useless.

I think that it is the responsibility of the author to handle that all
CI tasks pass and che-bot comments doesn't help with that much. IMHO
bottom status is perfect for that as you can see overall status. If
you need more details, you can always click on the "Details" for task
you're interested.

I'd like to propose to disable che-bot comments by default and make it
possible to enable it with a label. If disable by default is not
acceptable for whatever reason, at least make it possible to disable
che-bot comments with a label.

What do you think?


Additional question, I have no idea how che-bot is configured. Is it
written in code somewhere? Do we have access to that code and can we
create PR for it? Or is it configured via some github UI and only some
maintainers have access to it?


-- 
Michal Vala
Software Engineer, Eclipse Che
Red Hat Czech