Automatically add comment to pull request when repo is forked

[jenlampton]

Someone wants to help me with an issue I am working on, and they do not yet have a fork of backdrop. They fork my fork.

The pull request I was working on (on the branch they forked) needs to have a comment added automatically notifying me that someone else is working on the same issue.

"@whoever has forked your fork and may be working on this issue as well: link"

[quicksketch]

I'm not sure this is doable because when a user forks another user's fork, they fork all the branches in the first user's repository. So you'd end up updating all the pull requests the first user has filed, rather than just updating the one PR that the second user wants to work on.

Generally I think this won't be too different from drupal.org, there's no way to know if two people are working on the same issue unless the issue is updated. As long as we require every PR to be associated with an issue (#10), then the issue will contain a canonical location for all PRs that have been filed.

[jenlampton]

With Drupal people don't have personal queues of patches that are separate from the issues (and don't state current status). Github provides "a place to go work" that has incomplete information. I'm sure there will be people will use their own list of PRs as a TODO list and won't check the original issues. It would be a good idea if we could keep that list up to date as well.

[sirkitree]

Has this actually happened?

I'm just wondering if this is something we're trying to be proactive in solving, or if it's actually a problem. Same with #12...

If this isn't currently a problem, perhaps we close these issues and reduce the noise, then open again if it actually starts to become a problem. Thoughts?

[jenlampton]

It came up because I'm the person who checks her list of PRs, and sometimes works on them. Not realising someone else has opened a new one, which may be more relevant or more correct than my approach.

If my PR could have been auto-closed or at least auto-commented then I wouldn't have wasted time working in the wrong direction (or maybe duplicating efforts). Of course, if I had clicked back to the original issue I might have noticed the new PR there too. ;)

I'd like to leave this as an open feature-request. We can revisit if people other than me start to have the same problems - I just thought that if adding comments & links was easy we might save some contributors some time and effort - always a good thing :)

[Gormartsen]

@jenlampton When somebody just simply fork a code, there is no way to tell that exactly this fork is going to be used for specific issue.

[ghost]

I just thought that if adding comments & links was easy...

I'm not sure this is doable because when a user forks another user's fork, they fork all the branches in the first user's repository.

...there is no way to tell that exactly this fork is going to be used for specific issue.

Looks like this isn't easy and no one else has had a problem with this. Closing this old issue then.