Show HN: Bot that mentions potential reviewers on pull requests | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bot that mentions potential reviewers on pull requests

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72 pointsvjeux13 comments

I've always loved this idea.

Fun fact: a blame-based suggested reviewers UI was included in the original Pull Request design mockups. We shipped with a much weaker list of everyone with write access list and eventually dropped the list altogether due to it not being very useful. I've always wished we would have revisited the blame based approach instead. A seemingly small feature that could dramatically improve communication and reduce noise.

Crucible essentially does this as well, when you create a review it will suggest reviewers based on commit history to the file. Sometimes handy, sometimes the bane of my coworkers life since he created the repo and migrated the 12 year old code base from svn repository, so he's defacto the default suggestion for any file that hasn't been touched in the last 2 years.

As someone in a similar boat, this is a reminder to remember to switch to a bot account when doing this type of setup work.

Neat idea! I'm not on any large repos, but I can see how this would be useful.

How (or why) is Facebook claiming this is (or will be) patented? https://github.com/facebook/mention-bot/blob/master/PATENTS

This post has more information on what the patent grant is: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1639473982937255/updating-ou...

Thanks, that's helpful. It still strikes me as presumptuous to "grant" a patent license to non-patentable and un-patented material, but I suppose it makes sense from a cover-your-ass point of view.

Where would I have to ask to get legally binding information on the specific patents for this bot?

I am definitely not going to use its source (due to licensing issues with Facebook already), but if there is even a tiny chance that the idea is patented, I won’t touch it either.

I could be wrong and IANAL, but I doubt you'll be able to get lawyers for Facebook to spend time on request to figure out which patents might cover a particular piece of code - especially since I think telling you there aren't any might let you claim estoppel in the (extremely unlikely) case they actually wanted to sue you.

But you can get a list of Facebook's patents here:

http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php

edit: Of course, just because they're including patent boilerplate doesn't mean anyone actually did this research in the first place or believes that a particular patent covers it; I would be surprised if someone had, as opposed it just being standard boilerplate (although it doesn't seem to be on all their projects). There's little reason to worry more about patents on this project than on any other open source project distributed under a BSD license, without an "additional" grant of patent rights. Not none, but little.

Well, I distrust this kind of software patents in general, and (this violates Facebook’s patent grant) think most of them are invalid, including many which Facebook owns.

So, as I directly and openly violate their grant, I’d prefer to make sure that their patents either (a) don’t apply in Germany, or (b) are invalid, or (c) they don’t actually have patented a specific kind of idea.

Sadly it is next to impossible to get a patent for software in germany. It has to interface with some kind of hardware (like an engine control software in a car or plane). A bot or something similar that only runs on a computer can't be patented in germany.

I am german myself and work on a research project and we tested some software on our participants and they loved it. So we thought about protecting our idea / software.

For that reason we attended a talk held by multiple patent lawyers specialised in germany law and all of them said the same: "It can't be done without a hardware interface".

They are not claiming this specifically is patented, this is standard boilerplate on all their projects.

so it's basically get_maintainer.pl sans usable MAINTAINERS file?

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