github-ircbot should support "topic: GitHubURL" as alias of "github topic: GitHubURL"

[tantek]

The wgmeeting-github-ircbot should support the syntax:

topic: GitHubURL

where GitHubURL is a URL that starts with https://github.com/ ... and ends with a number segment (optional # fragment), just as it currently supports the "github topic: GitHubURL" syntax, because it is easier to remember, and 100% of past uses of "topic: GitHubURL" were clearly intended to do just that, and had to be unnecessarily followed up by a redundant "github topic: GitHubURL" command.

E.g. from the #css IRC log search results:

2017-04-20
#	shane Topic: https://github.com/w3c/fxtf-drafts/issues/73	22:46:43 PDT
#	shane Github Topic: https://github.com/w3c/fxtf-drafts/issues/73	22:46:57 PDT

#	shane Topic: https://github.com/w3c/fxtf-drafts/issues/69	23:05:39 PDT
#	shane Github Topic: https://github.com/w3c/fxtf-drafts/issues/69	23:05:44 PDT

#	shane Topic: https://github.com/w3c/fxtf-drafts/issues/51	23:16:00 PDT
#	shane Github topic: https://github.com/w3c/fxtf-drafts/issues/51	23:16:06 PDT

2017-05-24
#	myles TOPIC: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1345	09:54:12 PDT
#	myles Github topic: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1345	09:54:25 PDT

Note that this is a very precise request for what to allow, with the text after "Topic: " immediately being an https://github.com/ URL without anything else preceding, and ending with a URL segment that is a number, to avoid errant use of other GitHub URLs.

Given that level of precision, this reflects existing attempted use in the logs 100%, and is sufficiently guarded against false positives, at least from the past ~4 years of history in the logs.

(Originally published at: https://tantek.com/2020/050/b1/)

[dbaron]

This was supported in my initial version of the bot, but it was one of the first things I had to remove when it was used in a live CSS WG meeting, in 8379709.

Fundamentally, I think this is because there are two separate things that need to happen:

1. setting the boundaries of the sections for each topic (where each should be a post in a comment on github)
2. saying where each section should go.

There's a tendency to frequently correct the second one. But if the normal way of doing the second one involves also doing the first one, then any corrections to the second (since people will just use the usual command that they're used to) will also lead to a boundary, which will then lead to incorrect results: the single topic split into multiple pieces, where some of those pieces get posted to the wrong github issue or to no github issue at all.

The use of Topic: lines as separators is a convention predating this bot; it goes back to scribe.perl, which many of the groups using this bot also use.

I'd like to do what's in #45 instead of what's here.

Another possibility (instead of or in addition to #45) would be integrating the correct commands for this bot into Zakim's agenda management features, or integrating similar agenda management features into this bot.

[nigelmegitt]

I just had a very confusing experience related to this. I discovered that including [repo owner]/[repo name]#[issue number] in the Topic or Subtopic line makes github-bot issue a line, like so:

nigel: Topic:  Rather than using ttm:role for script type, define new attribute w3c/dapt#54
Github: https://github.com/w3c/dapt/issues/54 : Rather than using ttm:role for script type, define new attribute

which looks really helpful. But I got caught out because the bot doesn't actually start logging at this point. To make it do that I had to copy/paste that Github line, up to and including the URL.

This was really surprising behaviour to me, and I didn't get the result I imagined I would.

[nigelmegitt]

Update: it seems that the Github: line might be being generated by another integration, with Matrix, and nothing to do with github-bot at all. Sigh.

[dbaron]

I just checked the bot's logs, and it looks like whatever that integration was, it didn't show up on IRC at all. So it seems plausible that it's a matrix integration.

(The Topic line came from you at 15:56:43 UTC today, and then there was a github line from you at 15:56:54 UTC today (11 seconds later), which the bot responded to, but nothing on IRC between them.)

[nigelmegitt]

Oh, that's interesting: the bot's logs don't show it, but the W3C IRC logs at https://www.w3.org/2022/09/29-tt-irc do show it. It's possible that the message was sent as some kind of announcement (a NOTICE command, maybe?) that the bot ignores.