Bug 239124

Summary:	Need way to subscribe to labels on GitHub
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro>
Component:	Tools / Tests	Assignee:	Nobody <webkit-unassigned>
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	Normal	CC:	jbedard, mcatanzaro, pgriffis, rik, webkit-bug-importer
Priority:	P2	Keywords:	InRadar
Version:	WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	239082

Description Michael Catanzaro 2022-04-12 06:29:41 PDT

For pull requests to find interested reviewers, we need a way to subscribe to labels. E.g. I want to receive notifications for pull requests with a WebKitGTK or WPE label. Another developer might want to watch Network, Multimedia, JavaScriptCore, Web Inspector, etc. This is super easy to do with GitLab, but GitHub does not have this functionality at all. I believe when we previously discussed this problem, somebody suggested running a bot that would allow us to emulate this functionality by subscribing to notifications from the bot. Does anybody remember what this bot was, or have another concrete suggestion on how to make this work?

(This will be a problem for issues as well, if we eventually move from Bugzilla to GitHub issues, but I imagine the solution would be the same.)

Comment 1 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2022-04-19 06:30:14 PDT

<rdar://problem/91956295>

Comment 2 Michael Catanzaro 2022-07-19 11:35:46 PDT

(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #0)
> For pull requests to find interested reviewers, we need a way to subscribe
> to labels.

Well we kind of solved this with the CODEOWNERS file, which is even more flexible, but problem is non-reviewers need to be able to subscribe to stuff too. So we still need a way to subscribe to labels.

Comment 3 Jonathan Bedard 2022-07-21 10:33:11 PDT

(In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #2)
> (In reply to Michael Catanzaro from comment #0)
> > For pull requests to find interested reviewers, we need a way to subscribe
> > to labels.
> 
> Well we kind of solved this with the CODEOWNERS file, which is even more
> flexible, but problem is non-reviewers need to be able to subscribe to stuff
> too. So we still need a way to subscribe to labels.

I think this is more accurately "non-contributors", there isn't anything stopping a non-reviewer from watching a specific directory, and there are often cases where a non-reviewer's approval is still relevant (even though `merge-queue` won't respect it as a review). I don't disagree with your point, just wanted to call out that (in my opinion, at least) one does not need to be a reviewer to be in code owners. As an example, I have Zhifei Fang as code owner of some services code he is definitely the expert on despite Zhifei not yet being a reviewer.

Comment 4 Michael Catanzaro 2022-07-21 10:43:45 PDT

That's too inflexible, I'm afraid.

Let me reword the title to be more clear: what I'm looking for is subscribe to labels, so you can follow issues or pull requests with a specific label. I'm still surprised GitHub does not have this feature built-in, but I understand it's possible via bots or automation.

Comment 5 Michael Catanzaro 2022-08-10 10:41:21 PDT

Don found: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/subscribe-to-label-action

which is probably the best we're going to be able to do.

Comment 6 Jonathan Bedard 2022-08-15 13:28:15 PDT

My concern with @ing users is it’s not clear how expandable such a system is, given we often have dozens of users tracking a specific PR. Probably will just have a comment we constantly edit, but that feels hackey…