Create a todocheck-bot for reopening issues on github if unclosed TODOs are present

[preslavmihaylov]

The most tedious part of using todocheck is that when someone closes an issue as they assume it's done, all future todocheck CI steps start to fail as there are TODOs referenced to a closed issue.

This requires someone to manually reopen the issue in order to unblock all failing CI pipelines.

By having a bot automate this process, this would improve user experience \w todocheck tremendously.

The scope of this task is to create a github action called todocheck-bot, which triggers on "issue closed" events, runs todocheck against the repository & reopens the issue if there are TODOs linked against the closed issue.

This is a big undertaking & might even require a separate repository and/or several follow-up tasks. But this project seems to be possible using Github actions, similar to this project

[bengsparks]

I would be interested in taking part in this issue. Has any work on this started yet?

[preslavmihaylov]

No, no work is started for this yet. You can take it on.

I would initially start with making a github action which runs todocheck on CI & validates the TODOs in your codebase

[bengsparks]

Here is the current state of work: https://github.com/bengsparks/todocheck-bot.
If issue references were included in the todocheck output, then the support for Github is about 90% complete.

[preslavmihaylov]

Aren't they included? You link todos with e.g. // TODO #25: ... and 25 is the issue ID in github

[bengsparks]

The standard output does include them in their output:

ERROR: Issue doesn't exist
testing/scenarios/swift/main.kt:1: /* TODO 1: Add Spring dependencies (open issue) */

However, the JSON style output does not:

{
        "type": "Issue doesn't exist",
        "filename": "testing/scenarios/swift/main.kt",
        "line": 1,
        "message": ""
},

The JSON style output is probably the better option here, simply because it is easier to load into JS / TS, and the todocheck bot wouldn't have to reimplement the parsing already done by todocheck in order to extract the issue ref from the comment.

[preslavmihaylov]

Ahh, you're right. I've opened a follow-up issue for that - #162

Feel free to take that up as well if interested.

[bengsparks]

The first working proof of concept can be found here:
https://github.com/bengsparks/todocheck-bot/releases/tag/v0.0.2.

The workflow is triggered by this file.

It currently does nothing else except just reopening prematurely closed issues and lacks QoL features such as commenting why the issue was suddenly reopened.
Another interesting avenue to pursue might be to prevent merging PRs if issues that would be closed thereby are still in the codebase.

But I suppose now that GitHub is at least supported we can move discussion to repository mentioned above?