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. There are pull requests by newcomers, which 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” challanges 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 procude too much 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 challanges of the code changes.

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