Support for "silent" PRs?

[RalfJung]

PRs like rust-lang/rust#99368 cause a lot of premature pings -- it's just a perf experiment, we don't have to all know about that.

So maybe it should be possible to somehow tell triagebot to not do mentions for a particular PR? We have a special exception for rollups that does this I think, but other PRs might also want it. Ideally, if it turns out the perf experiment gives the expected results and we do want to land that PR, there is a way to tell triagebot to now please do the pings that have been suppressed so far.

[matthiaskrgr]

Triagebot could ignore the pings as long as the ghost user is assigned and do the ping only once someone requests an actual reviewer via r? maybe?

[RalfJung]

I guess that would somewhat replicate the old "accidentally silent" system that highfive had.

However, for Miri PRs, I do like the rustbot pings so I don't have to do them. I guess it could do the pings both on r? and when it sees a bors message saying "commit blah has been approved" (but not in rollups)?

[Mark-Simulacrum]

I think using GitHub's draft PR status might be a good fit here. It won't prevent any interaction with bots (including bors, afaik) and seems like a reasonable "should be silent as an experiment that won't land" status. Also easy to notice and know to clear as an author, hopefully.

I think we may want a separate mechanism too (similar to special case for rollups), that's just indicative that this PR shouldn't be notified on - but I'm not sure how large the remaining territory is where pings are annoying and draft PR doesn't make sense.

[ehuss]

Turning off mentions for draft PRs sounds like a good idea to me. I posted #1638 to implement that.

Unfortunately I suspect most people won't know to use draft PRs for things like performance testing, so I'm not sure it will be particularly effective. I also like the idea of not pinging on unassigned/ghost PRs, but it sounds like that won't work for Ralf's case. I also suspect that any "don't mention" tagging mechanism won't be particularly effective since just like draft PRs, I don't think people will know to do that.

I'm not sure I have any ideas other than looking at the assignee to avoid it.

[RalfJung]

Is it even possible to mark a PR as draft during creation (so that it applies for the initial pings)?

[jyn514]

Is it even possible to mark a PR as draft during creation (so that it applies for the initial pings)?

Yes, it shows up on the "Create Pull Request" button (there's a little drop-down that lets you pick "Create Draft Pull Request" instead).

[RalfJung]

Yes, it shows up on the "Create Pull Request" button (there's a little drop-down that lets you pick "Create Draft Pull Request" instead).

Wow that is super well-hidden, even Ctrl-F "draft" does not find it. You have to basically know about it to be able to find it...

[jyn514]

yeah, lots of github's ui is super unintuitive ... took me like a year to figure out that y gets you a permalink to the current line in the source