Switching package registration systems soon

I’ve also looked into making pull requests automatically to add project files to packages that don’t have them. However, there are some issues.

  • GitHub does not like it when people do this from personal accounts—see the last point in New tools for open source maintainers | The GitHub Blog@staticfloat did this previously to update a lot of travis scripts but got in some hot water for it.

  • The approved way to do this seems to be create a GitHub integration, which is pretty heavyweight—it’s annoying to do from the developer perspective and needs to be added to the relevant package repos by developers, at which point it doesn’t seem that much easier than running a script locally for a one-time benefit.

In the end, I’m pretty sure that between the difficulty of getting an integration working correctly and people having to add the integration to their repos, this is more work and less reliable than just having package maintainers check out their own package repos and running the script I wrote on them. After doing that, developers can inspect the results locally and push the changes if they look good.

Note that GitHub has no issue with people doing automated actions on their own repos (they explicitly call this out as acceptable in the above article), so if someone wants to script that with the hub tool or something, that could be something that people with many package repos could use.

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