Activate the powers of Probot: WIP label

Sometimes a user shows interest in working on an issue, or has even opened a PR but is reworking it before it is ready for review. We usually ask users to comment on an issue they’re interested in and sometimes they will yet then nothing ever happens. In PR land sometimes one goes back into the oven for more work with no further review needed until it is ready again, usually there the PR gets prefixed with “WIP” or so.

There is now a “WORK IN PROGRESS” label to use for these kinds of cases. And I believe that might be a perfect first use case for involving Probot - and a similar script exists already: https://probot.github.io/apps/wip/

I think we should be able to tweak that to work off a label instead and support the following use cases:

Issues

• Apply the label to an issue on demand using a trigger phase. Like “Probot/Gooey/whatever: x would like to work on this” -> the label is applied and the issue assigned to user x (if possible)
• Query the user for an update after y days (two weeks maybe?) if no visible activity from the user + the label is still active, to ask the user if they’re still working on it
• If the label is still present after z days and the user hasn’t responded then take off the label and unassign the user

PRs

• If a PR is open allow a user to use a trigger phrase like “Put this PR back in the oven” or so to attach the label and assign it to the author. Alternatively an author can start the PR with the label at which point it should be assigned to them automatically
• Same as issues if there’s no activity for a while make Probot ping the user if they’re still working on it
• Same as issues later yet take off the WIP and comment about the lack of activity to see whether we should consider closing the PR

Further ideas appreciated. Adding Good First Issue + Research to anybody interested in learning about Probot and summarizing here how they think this should be done, not that this can necessarily be done by anybody (I think we might need to host a new Probot script somewhere? I forget)

[syntaxi]

Done. If anything comes up whilst you’re working on this feel free to ask us on the discord or slack

[Cervator]

@stellargo throwing another bit of chaos into the proceedings is that now https://github.com/features/actions is a thing - and they support Probot actions as steps … 😁

I’m not sure what to do next / how to organize, but it would probably be the easiest to discuss on chat sometime now that I’m back home 😃