All contributors app & CLI

[lwasser]

Hi @all-contributors/maintainers 👋🏻

I think we need to spend a bit of time thinking about the app and the CLI and how they work together. Who here on the maintainers team can help with this? I will need to learn more about JS packaging and how app deployment works.

If you are on the maintainers team, see this ping and would like to be removed/moved to emeritus status, also please do let me know. We don't expect people to be maintainers for life :) However, we would like to onboard some new team members to help if most of those on this list need to step down.

[gr2m]

I can help with all questions related to GitHub Apps and GitHub platform APIs in general. I just don't have much time right now and for the rest of the year.

[JimMadge]

I would like to get involved eventually. Also need to do some JS learning. There are some quirks of the CLI/bot that my communities have wanted to look at changing for a while 😆.

I expect my time will be very limited in the foreseeable future though, and I think we should make sure to finish the website stuff first.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

FWIW I'd be happy to help anybody ramp up on these JS-world concepts. I'm not deeply familiar with all-contributors specifically but can advise on JS apps, packaging, package managers, etc.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

As for thinking about the app and CLI themselves: I don't have many grandiose visions here. I'm somewhat satisfied with how things are. If they were to get back into maintenance and get to stability, I'd be mostly happy. The painful issues I know of are:

• Redundant commitConvention and repoType added to .all-contributorsrc file on add cli#369
• contributorsSortAlphabetically alphabetical sort shouldn't be case sensitive cli#370
• add command overrides other contributions if given any existing ones cli#371

The main growth area I'm invested in is reducing the clutter all-contributors causes in repositories. Having an explicit config file in the repo root, duplicated by information in the README.md, is not ideal. Web repos tend to have a lot of root-level files. That makes them less approachable and more intimidating for many -- especially newcomers. Similar with lots of bot comments: they take up space and come across as required reading. The main issues for this I know of are:

• Files:
  • One option: Is it possible to put .all-contributorsrc in subfolders? cli#328 (IMO not ideal, as it still causes more churn, but better than the status quo)
  • My preference: Make the .all-contributorsrc file optional (infer contributors from README.md) #808, along with:
    • Default contributorsSortAlphabetically to whether existing contributors are already sorted alphabetically #809
    • Default badgeTemplate to what's in the README.md already #810
    • Default projectName and projectOwner to values from package.json if possible #811
• GitHub comments: Hide request comment as resolved after PR is closed app#504

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Thinking about "future big improvements": the most interesting area to me is automatically detecting contributions when possible. It's obviously not doable to infer all contributions. There'll always need to be ways for maintainers to add contributions manually. But IME when a repository follows standard conventions such as conventional commits, most contributions can be automatically inferred. Some kind of system has been brought up before:

• There has to be a way to automate this #18
• Fetch or auto-discover contributors (auto-generate) cli#117

all-contributors/cli#196 is a very interesting area of work around using ML to be smart about inferring contributions. That's very technically cool but IME difficult to implement well. I think a best next step would be to go off of deterministic criteria such as event types and conventional commit/PR titles.

For reference, I've had detection implemented in most of the repositories I manage for a few years now:

• https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/all-contributors-for-repository: APIs that query the GitHub API for statically determinable contributions (see its README.md for details)
• https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/all-contributors-auto-action: runs that automatically, posting @all-contributors bot comments as needed

I'd be happy to "donate" those projects to the all-contributors team if there's ever any interest in joint maintenance.