github: Add GitHub action to greet first time contributors

[kartben]

Adds the configuration file for a GitHub action that will greet first-time contributor the first time they:

• open an issue
• open a PR
• get a PR of theirs merged

[stephanosio]

No objection to this in general, but would like a bit more community input before we merge this.

[kartben]

Thanks for the swift review @stephanosio! And +1 to gather community input (I actually considered opening an RFC but that felt overkill?)
FWIW @carlescufi just suggested that this might be better off implemented as a Github action, e.g. using https://github.com/marketplace/actions/first-interaction

[stephanosio]

FWIW @carlescufi just suggested that this might be better off implemented as a Github action, e.g. using https://github.com/marketplace/actions/first-interaction

AFAICS, that action adds a comment when a user opens their first issue/PR, not when the first PR is merged.

p.s. I suppose you could make it comment when the first PR is merged by restricting the pull_request event types to merged -- not sure if that is a supported configuration/works with that particular action though.

[kartben]

FWIW @carlescufi just suggested that this might be better off implemented as a Github action, e.g. using https://github.com/marketplace/actions/first-interaction

AFAICS, that action adds a comment when a user opens their first issue/PR, not when the first PR is merged.

Yup, there's a bug open actions/first-interaction#226

p.s. I suppose you could make it comment when the first PR is merged by restricting the pull_request event types to merged -- not sure if that is a supported configuration/works with that particular action though.

Ya I can try -- but my guess it will then not properly determine that the now-merged-PR is the first one from this contributor https://github.com/actions/first-interaction/blob/main/src/main.ts#L149..L151
EDIT: mmm actually it might just work -- i misinterpreted the == 0 check above.
EDIT2: oh well, this one is actually a blocker: https://github.com/actions/first-interaction/blob/main/src/main.ts#L19-L22. Guess I might just fork the action

[kartben]

OK so following @carlescufi's recommendation, I've forked the actions/first-interaction GH action to add support for "comment on first PR merged".
I am trying to see with the upstream project if they are willing to take my PR, or if we will have to go with a fork.

In the meanwhile, for those interested, below is the wording I came up with. I've added the GH action to this test repo, feel free to try it out: https://github.com/kartben/delete-me4.

name: first-interaction

on:
  issues:
    types: [opened]
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, closed]

jobs:
  check_for_first_interaction:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3 
      - uses: kartben/[email protected]
        with:
          repo-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          
          issue-message: >
            Hi @${{github.event.issue.user.login}}! We appreciate you submitting your first issue
            for our open-source project. 🌟


            Even though I'm a bot, I can assure you that the whole community is genuinely grateful
            for your time and effort. 🤖💙

          pr-opened-message: >
            Hello @${{ github.event.pull_request.user.login }}, and thank you very much for your
            first pull request to the Zephyr project!
            

            As our Continuous Integration jobs run checks on your PR to ensure it's compliant and
            doesn't cause any issues, you might want to take this opportunity to review the
            project's [Contributor
            Expectations](https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/contribute/contributor_expectations.html)
            and make any updates to your pull request if necessary. 😊



          pr-merged-message: >
            Hi @${{ github.event.pull_request.user.login }}! 
            
            Congratulations on getting your very first Zephyr pull request merged 🎉🥳. This is a
            fantastic achievement, and we're thrilled to have you as part of our community!
            

            To celebrate this milestone and showcase your contribution, we'd love to award you the
            Zephyr Technical Contributor badge. If you're interested, please claim your badge by
            filling out this form: [Claim Your Zephyr Badge](https://forms.gle/oCw9iAPLhUsHTapc8).
            

            Thank you for your valuable input, and we look forward to seeing more of your
            contributions in the future! 🪁

[mbolivar-nordic]

As our Continuous Integration jobs run checks on your PR to ensure it's compliant and doesn't cause any issues

@kartben misleading: CI workflows for first-time contributors must be manually approved on every push

[kartben]

As our Continuous Integration jobs run checks on your PR to ensure it's compliant and doesn't cause any issues

@kartben misleading: CI workflows for first-time contributors must be manually approved on every push

+1, I also caught that, thanks! Will update the wording.

[kartben]

As our Continuous Integration jobs run checks on your PR to ensure it's compliant and doesn't cause any issues

@kartben misleading: CI workflows for first-time contributors must be manually approved on every push

Actually, I just remembered thinking twice while writing it -- it is in fact the correct wording :) As this is implemented as a Github action, the bot will in fact comment on the PR only when someone will have manually approved CI. If you think that can help people understand better how we work the message could actually be reworded something like "A project maintainer just triggered our CI pipeline to run on your contribution, ...."

[kartben]

Unfortunately, I haven't heard back from the maintainers of the actions/first-interaction (see actions/first-interaction#226).

Can someone please help me get this fork https://github.com/kartben/first-interaction/tree/v1.1.2-zephyr hosted under the zephyrproject-rtos organization?
@carlescufi

[mbolivar-nordic]

As this is implemented as a Github action, the bot will in fact comment on the PR only when someone will have manually approved CI.

Ah, OK! That makes sense.

If you think that can help people understand better how we work the message could actually be reworded something like "A project maintainer just triggered our CI pipeline to run on your contribution, ...."

I think that would be an improvement.

[kartben]

I think that would be an improvement.

+1. I've fixed the wording.
I am ready to move the PR out of draft state -- would be great if someone can assist me with getting a new repo created into the org for the GH action. Ideally it's created as a actual fork of https://github.com/actions/first-interaction so that it properly shows up in Github as being a fork.

[mbolivar-nordic]

would be great if someone can assist me with getting a new repo created into the org for the GH action.

Take the PR out of draft and add TSC label -- if nobody gets to it by the next TSC meeting, it can be handled then

[kartben]

No objection to this in general, but would like a bit more community input before we merge this.

@stephanosio please have another look when you get a chance. Thanks!

[nordicjm]

I guess my question to this is pretty brief: why?

[kartben]

I guess my question to this is pretty brief: why?

Mmmh I guess I could reply briefly too... why not? The idea is simply to encourage first time contributors (which we get on a daily basis) to get more involved and to really make the point that we do value their contributions. While it certainly won't be the silver bullet that will get people to automagically consider becoming long-time contributors, my hope is that it can contribute to getting some of them to come back.

FWIW, out of the 500+ unique individuals who contributed to Zephyr over the last 6 months, roughly 50% contributed 2 commits or less (in fact, 33% contributed only 1). Even if we capture a small portion of these folks, I'll consider this to be a win, but YMMV.

[stephanosio]

I am very concerned about the isFirstPull function implementation:
zephyrproject-rtos/action-first-interaction@5d55935#diff-7934bf411fea192ad8cd69e0a12911648a2842cb0f2409a8fb67b41b7069d757R153

function isFirstPull(client, sender, curPullNumber, closed, page = 1) {
    var _a;
    return __awaiter(this, void 0, void 0, function* () {
...
        return yield isFirstPull(client, sender, curPullNumber, closed, page + 1);
    });
}

Here you are effectively querying every pull request that has ever been created in the repository whenever a pull request is opened or closed, with each query API request returning 100 of them.

We currently have a total of 38670 pull requests in the Zephyr main repository, and that means 387 API requests per every PR open/close!

This is simply not going to scale and we will hit the API request limit very quickly.

[nordicjm]

FWIW, out of the 500+ unique individuals who contributed to Zephyr over the last 6 months, roughly 50% contributed 2 commits or less (in fact, 33% contributed only 1). Even if we capture a small portion of these folks, I'll consider this to be a win, but YMMV.

I've seen numerous PRs that are a first time contribution for someone fixing a typo or fixing a very minor issue with the documentation - and that's the only PR they ever do, it's a wrong assumption to assume that every contributor is going to submit multiple PRs to the project, maybe they're correcting an issue they saw and other than that they're entirely happy with how the code is. From my perspective I don't see the value this adds, if someone has something to contribute, they can contribute it, if not, then there's nothing to submit.

[carlescufi]

As our Continuous Integration jobs run checks on your PR to ensure it's compliant and doesn't cause any issues

@kartben misleading: CI workflows for first-time contributors must be manually approved on every push

Not all of them though! Just a subset, which is confusing.

[carlescufi]

@kartben I have no objections to this PR, thanks for the effort in forking the original action and modifying it to add the functionality we need. The comments from @stephanosio however need to be investigated. I wonder if there is an easier way to find out? For example using https://docs.github.com/en/rest/repos/repos?apiVersion=2022-11-28#get-a-repository to get the contributor list and then check if the user is on that list?

[kartben]

We currently have a total of 38670 pull requests in the Zephyr main repository, and that means 387 API requests per every PR open/close!

This is simply not going to scale and we will hit the API request limit very quickly.

I was just starting to think about it and yes, you're probably right :) I got misled by the way the original action was doing things, and the fact that it said that there's no API to filter PRs by creator (see https://github.com/actions/first-interaction/blob/main/src/main.ts#L126) so didn't look/think further.

I will look at @carlescufi's suggestion but it also looks like I can probably get all I need with the /search API (is:pr repo:zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr author:janedoe, for which the rate limit is 30 requests per minute which should be plenty.

[stephanosio]

but it also looks like I can probably get all I need with the /search API (is:pr repo:zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr author:janedoe, for which the rate limit is 30 requests per minute which should be plenty.

Agreed. The search-based solution sounds quite promising.

The contributor list approach has the following issue;

This endpoint may return information that is a few hours old because the GitHub REST API caches contributor data to improve performance.

[dkalowsk]

FWIW, out of the 500+ unique individuals who contributed to Zephyr over the last 6 months, roughly 50% contributed 2 commits or less (in fact, 33% contributed only 1). Even if we capture a small portion of these folks, I'll consider this to be a win, but YMMV.

I've seen numerous PRs that are a first time contribution for someone fixing a typo or fixing a very minor issue with the documentation - and that's the only PR they ever do, it's a wrong assumption to assume that every contributor is going to submit multiple PRs to the project, maybe they're correcting an issue they saw and other than that they're entirely happy with how the code is. From my perspective I don't see the value this adds, if someone has something to contribute, they can contribute it, if not, then there's nothing to submit.

I tend to fall in the same camp here. I find such automated messages to be annoying and generally a turn off to contributing further. I also don't see any harm in trying something new to encourage contributions. If it works, great. If it doesn't it can be iterated to a better solution or disabled later. Most of the regular contributors will never even see the message.

[kartben]

Agreed. The search-based solution sounds quite promising.

And so much easier too! Action has been updated in this PR: zephyrproject-rtos/action-first-interaction#1

[nordicjm]

A side effect of this is you can now no longer tell the status of issues submitted, given the following list of queries, is someone dealing with them/asking questions or is it a bot posting a comment?

[kartben]

A side effect of this is you can now no longer tell the status of issues submitted, given the following list of queries, is someone dealing with them/asking questions or is it a bot posting a comment?

I get your point but I'd argue that only using "has 0 comment" as the criteria to determine if someone has engaged is probably not the best approach in the first place as it can miss instances where the original author made several comments // see e.g the following issues, by only looking at the first two pages of opened issues
#56614
#56670
#56697
#57037