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Ask HN: What is an issue/merge bot good for on gitlab?

1 points by theSage ↗ HN
I've been meaning to put up an issue bot for auto labeling of issues and a merge bot for handling WIP tags etc in our company's gitlab.

Does anyone have experience doing the same? If so what is one thing that this bot would absolutely need to do?

So far I've seen them clean up stale issues, make sure contributors sign contracts. Is there something else these are good for?

4 comments

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rurban
I'm tracking patches for external git projects I'm using with such a local merge/rebase bot. you need to enable the rr-cache then. manual intervention only needed once a year. tracking submodules alone doesn't keep your patches.
theSage
you wrote the bot or is there a service I don't know about?
rurban
I wrote it. just a few bash lines for each project I'm tracking. some are even CVS, svn or hg, using the relevant git importers.
meks
Hey there, this is Mek from Gitlab.

In addition to using the bot to clean up stale issues, we are also using it for label hygiene and triage package automation.

- Label hygiene. Detect missed deliverable and track the version of regressions. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/49201 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/48518

- Triage package, we work remotely hence there is no bug grooming meeting, we do all of this in issues. A triage package is generated for each team by the bot every week. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/52781

You can set this up rather easily via the gitlab-triage project. The project is public https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-triage

You can see how the bot is being used in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/quality/triage-ops