CI: Adding GitHub action to assign issues based on comment

[datapythonista]

Currently, only maintainers and triagers can assign issues.

This implements a hack, so when any contributor writes the keyword take in an issue, GitHub actions will automatically assign the issue to the commenter.

I think this should be very helpful once people start to assign issues to themselves, since adding the Assigned to nobody filter should let people find issues that nobody is working on. May be in the future we want to implement another action to unassign issues after a period of inactivity, but so far this should be much better than just having people adding comments.

@pandas-dev/pandas-core what do you think?

[WillAyd]

Sounds good. Not a huge blocker for me just a counter point, but certainly open to it. Sorry if missed discussion on it during dev chat

…

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 16, 2019, at 5:59 PM, Marc Garcia ***@***.***> wrote:  @datapythonista commented on this pull request. In doc/source/development/contributing.rst: > @@ -24,6 +24,27 @@ and `good first issue where you could start out. Once you've found an interesting issue, you can return here to get your development environment setup. +When you start working on an issue, it's a good idea to assign the issue to yourself, My view is that now people is already locking issues for themselves using a comment. And I assume most people don't start working on something if they see someone else said they are working on it. For me that's reasonable. The problem that I see is that there is no way to get the list of issues nobody is working on. Using Assignees would make things easier: No need to spend the time writing comments to say you want to work on something Creating a filter for issues not assign becomes trivial Unassigning yourself from an issue is trivial (and I guess more likely, since having your name formally in assignees should give certain sense of responsibility) It becomes trivial to know if someone is assign, without having to read possibly ambiguous comments (e.g. "is it ok if I work in this?") I guess implementing a bot that unassignes issues after some time (a week?) of inactivity should be easy I'm optimistic that if we start using assignees, we could possibly create 200 issues for small fixes (e.g. small changes to docstrings), label them, promote somewhere (social media, sprints...), and we should be able to provide a link where people knows what is pending (not assigned). We'll see how this works in practice, but I think it's worth trying. I don't expect this discouraging people or making things more inefficient. But it can possibly make it easier for people who want to contribute, to find things to work on. — You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[jreback]

how about take-issue or assign-issue (then in theory could actually specify a username after)

[datapythonista]

For the keyword, I found take the simplest option (thought of assign too, but I think it's easier to make typos, asign, assing...).

I thought about adding a user after it, but we (maintainers/triagers) can already assign issues with GitHub UI. And I don't see regular users wanting to assign to someone else. And note that GitHub limits assignees to people who commented on the issue. That's the "fun" part, creating the comment with the take is what allows the action to assign to the commenter.

[jreback]

k

[jreback]

ok let's try this