Reviewdog findings are code reviews

Context and Problem Statement

JabRef offers guidelines to setup the local workspace. There is also a section on JabRef’s code style. Some pull requests by newcomers do not follow that style guide.

How to quickly provide feedback to contributors that checkstyle was not matched?

Decision Drivers

• Be friendly to newcomers
• Provide fast feedback to contributors
• Lower the workload of maintainers
• Keep maintainers focused on the “real” challenges of the code changes

Considered Options

• Use Reviewdog’s PullRequest review reporter
• Use Reviewdog’s check reporter
• Use comment-failure-action

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: “Use Reviewdog’s PullRequest review reporter”, because resolves force to provide fast feedback. We do not want to use comment-failure-action, because it might produce too many comments. We accept that newcomers might be annoyed if quick automatic feedback by a bot is given: We value the time of our maintainers and want to keep them focused on the real challenges of the code changes.