Summary: Add bors d+ as an alias to bors delegate+ and bors d=someone as an alias to bors delegate=someone.
I allow this RFC document to be modified and redistributed under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license, or the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, at your option.
Motivation
Based on @tommilligan's pull request and @matklad's issue, a lot of people are annoyed by how long the delegate command's name is.
Guide-level explanation
In addition to adding reviewers who can approve any PR in the repo, you can “delegate” permission to approve a single PR to anyone else. It works like this:
@some-user: bors r+
@bors[bot]: Permission denied
@some-reviewer: bors d=some-user
@bors[bot]: some-user now has permission to review this pull request.
@some-user: bors r+
@bors[bot]: Added to queue
If some-user happens to be the pull request author, you can also use the shorthand d+ command.
Reference-level explanation
| Syntax | Description |
|---|---|
bors delegate+ |
Allow the pull request author to r+ their changes. |
bors delegate=[list] |
Allow the listed users to r+ this pull request’s changes. |
bors d+ |
Allow the pull request author to r+ their changes (same as delegate+). |
bors d=[list] |
Allow the listed users to r+ this pull request’s changes (same as delegate=[list]). |
Drawbacks
It adds another command that we need to maintain.
It's also less readable, though, since bors responds with a message with what you're doing, that should be fine. Also, we already allow the super-short and kind of opaque r+, so it doesn't make much sense to be picky about self-documenting commands.
Rationale and alternatives
-
Why is this design the best in the space of possible designs?
It fits with the way
r+andr=work. -
What other designs have been considered and what is the rationale for not choosing them?
About the only one that's really been considered is leaving it with
delegate. -
What is the impact of not doing this?
It's kind of annoying for people who regularly use delegation.
Prior art
No known prior art for this specifically. As an interesting note, the reason why the command keyword is bors instead of bors-ng, or the older name of this codebase, aelita2, is for this same reason, so there's lots of precedent for using short command names in bors.
Unresolved questions
The "design" is pretty much already nailed down.
Future possibilities
ping is extremely rare, and pretty short anyway, so there's no real point in abbreviating it. We also couldn't use p anyway, since that's already taken for priority adjustment.
The only other multi-letter commands are try and retry. Try is pretty short, at three letters, and retry ought to be pretty rare, even if not as rare as ping.