Auto Transform Future

[nathro]

The basics of AutoTransform have been made available through version 0.2.0 for anyone looking to handle migrations and maintenance using the platform. It's time now to start building on the functionality of the platform to better serve potential needs. Here's an initial layout of what the next ~6 months will look like for Auto Transform development, along with some ideas for potential feature development for the future. That said, if you use Auto Transform, or want to use Auto Transform, and have ideas or needs not currently covered, please post here or create an issue. Platforms work best when developed in close collaboration with their users.

All timelines are estimates and should not be construed as guaranties. Feature development and timelines are always subject to change, with features potentially dropped or added as priorities change. This is only intended to represent current plans/priorities

Goal

AutoTransform is a platform for automatic code modification, migration, and maintenance. It uses a component-based Schema model for structuring code changes, enabling these code changes to be deployed automatically to a codebase. With this Schema, AutoTransform will be capable of setting up recurring updates to a codebase, slow-rolling a migration, commenting/suggesting outstanding changes from human authors, automatically fixing human-created changes, and more. Once a programmatic change schema is created, it can be leveraged however is needed to ease codebase migrations and improve health while providing a clear path to sharing and co-developing solutions across many organizations.

July 31, 2022 - AutoTransform v 1.0.0

• Features
  • Replace PyGithub with GhAPI
    • GhAPI supports functionality that is not supported by PyGithub (i.e. multi-line comments) and will need to be evaluated as a replacement
  • Initialization Script Command
    • A script to initialize a repo to support AutoTransform, handles adding Github actions and setting up the config, as well as adding manage.json, schedule.json, and a sample schema file.
  • Config fetching
    • Update default config fetcher to pull from a repo-specific config as a priority, reverting to the existing config when no value present in repo-config, allowing easy sharing of autotransform settings
    • Update env var config fetcher to use default config fetcher values when no value present in env var, making it easier to
  • No empty batches options
    • Add an optional param to SingleBatcher to prevent creating empty batches
  • Add owners list to SchemaConfig
    • Adds a list of owners to schemas that can be used by components
    • List owners in Github pull-request
  • Add result to Transformer that can be used by commands/validators/batcher
    • This is the first step of the API that will be used for creating comments, but that will not be available in this release.
• Schemas
  • Python
    • Pants lint
    • Dependabot
    • More TBD
  • Android
    • TBD

October 31, 2022 - AutoTransform v 1.1.0

• Features
  • Forked repo pull requests
    • Enable submitting PRs against a main repo from a forked repo
  • Comments
    • Enable comments on pull request, including inline comments on files
    • Drawn from Transformer results
  • Run against human-authored changes
    • Enable running against outstanding human-authored changes and creating comments/suggestions
  • Request reviewers
    • Allow specific reviewers to be specified for batches
  • Components
    • InlineFileInput - A simple input for literal filepaths
    • LibCST Transformer - A simple transformer to hook up LibCST easily
    • HackTransformer - A simple wrapper with a structured API for invoking a transformer written in Hack, likely using HHAst
    • JSTransformer - A simple wrapper with a structured API for invoking a transformer written in Javascript, likely using JSCodeshift
  • Fix updates coming from Github-Actions bot instead of from authenticated bot
    • When AutoTransform uses Github Actions to update an outstanding change, the force push is listed as coming from the Github-Actions bot, rather than the bot in the config. Ideally, this should be fixed if possible.
• Schemas
  • Javascript
    • ESLint
    • TBD
  • Hack
    • HHAst Lint
    • Custom Linters
    • TBD

Future

A list of future ideas for AutoTransform to implement

• A repository of open-source schemas and components with a system similar to pip for installing and connecting them.
• Automating fixes for human-authored Changes
  • Allow the bot to push updates directly to human-authored changes to fix issues, provide an easy opt-in method for this functionality
• SyntacticTransformer
  • Allow specifying syntactic changes in a format similar to regex, but using AST aware transformations. Initial support will likely be for Hack, Javascript, and Python
  • i.e. find: “do_something(#A, #B)” replace: “do_something_new(#B, #A)” would turn do_something(1, “foo”) in to do_something_new(“foo”, 1)
• ASTTransformer
  • Provide a generic API for AST based transformations that can be connected to language specific ASTs

[nathro]

To give some more context to this, the 1.0.0 release is going to focus on the problem of deployment and set-up. While it won't be perfect, the goal is to make getting set up to run Auto Transform locally, or setting up a repo to use it, easier. I want clear, self-guided paths that people can follow for this. The 1.1.0 release will be more focused on features.

Along the way, I expect to release patches that include some of the updates i.e. 0.2.1, 0.2.2, etc...