improvement: better 'strings' message to maintainers

[david-allison]

We had a few cases where the process was not followed correctly

Improving the message should reduce the chance of this happening again

Fixes

• Fixes Proposal: improve the 'Translation Sync' message #16980

Approach

• Update the message

How Has This Been Tested?

Test results (on an issue, rather than a PR):

https://redirect.github.com/david-allison/Anki-Android/issues/42#issuecomment-2381427055

Learning (optional, can help others)

GitHub Actions are hard to test

"PR" URL was changed in Issue 15887:

• Sync Translations workflow: run checks without manual open/close #15887

- https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/pulls/app%2Fgithub-actions
+ https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/pulls/mikehardy-machineaccount

Checklist

• You have a descriptive commit message with a short title (first line, max 50 chars).
• You have commented your code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• You have performed a self-review of your own code
• UI changes: include screenshots of all affected screens (in particular showing any new or changed strings)
• UI Changes: You have tested your change using the Google Accessibility Scanner

[Arthur-Milchior]

As someone who made the mistake, I fear, twice, I am, to be frank, not entirely sure it'll help.
If other people are like me, the issue is not only that the message is unclear.
The issue could be that it appears after the creation of the PR, and there may be a lot of discussion between the automated message and the time it's worth merging the PR.

Maybe having this appear after an approval would help. But I doubt it. Because, most importantly, that seems to be noise. Same as the "This is your first PR, welcome to ankidroid" and, worst offender "this is your monthly reminder you can use open collective".
I'm really not used to see messages that are actually relevant here.

On the other paw, now that I know that string must be synced, I don't expect I'll do the message again.

[Arthur-Milchior]

If you want to be very specific in the message, I think a point that is simply about the review should be added.
It was very unclear to me what kind of review I could do given that I don't speak most languages.

3. Review that translations seems legit. Most troll can be easily detected (not the same character set as the remaining of the field, insults written in English...).
   3'. If there are errors do [what should be done. Or put a link to there]
4. Merge the string sync PR.

....

[david-allison]

Pushback: "How to do a code review" is out of scope here.

This should be a 'what' to do, rather than a 'how' to do it

[mikehardy]

@Arthur-Milchior only replying to note I see this:

worst offender "this is your monthly reminder you can use open collective".

...happy to do it some other way but I can't think of a way to reliably inform people at the moment?

[Arthur-Milchior]

@mikehardy No, I've no better idea.
Ideally, I'd just block this message, so that it stops popping in my notification for every PR in the ankidroid repo. But as far as I can see, I can't just block one user/bot. (Unless I block them for the whole repo, which I obviously won't do)

My point is only that, once a month (on average) there is a bunch of notification that I can just ignore. I just select them and mark the notification as "read".

I can't imagine any way to improve things here. At least not at AnkiDroid level, it would require a change in Github behaviour.

To take a step back, my main point was not about any specific message. Just about the fact that, I kind of learned that the bot's message are very repetitive, and so it's hard to pay attention to them.
But that's great. It means that any newcomer could read it once or twice. And any oldcomer could just state "great, this is time to ask to be paid!"

[david-allison]

As someone who made the mistake, I fear, twice, I am, to be frank, not entirely sure it'll help.
If other people are like me, the issue is not only that the message is unclear.
The issue could be that it appears after the creation of the PR, and there may be a lot of discussion between the automated message and the time it's worth merging the PR.

I'm hoping that using eye-catching admonitions reduces the chance of bad merges from happening.

There's a number of further automation steps which we can discuss & take which could block PR merges with strings, but I feel that this effort would be better spent on streamlining the translation sync process.

Specifically:

• Remove the need to open + close PRs: Sync Translations workflow: run checks without manual open/close #15887
• Better linkage from lint errors to Crowdin (heck, it's 5 minutes, I'll do this now): improvement(lint): 'TranslationTypo' - link to Crowdin  #17164

[mikehardy]

Remove the need to open + close PRs

That one in particular is galling to me. It has to be something about the workflow syntax and what events trigger it. I can't believe a push on the branch doesn't do it ? maybe it's a different event? I haven't investigated but what a silly thing to have to do, and personally frustrating because...generally I'm good with workflows but that one resisted my previous attempts

[david-allison]

• See: Sync Translations workflow: run checks without manual open/close #15887

GitHub has restrictions on recursive workflow runs, and recommends a machine account to resolve it

[lukstbit]

I was already ok with the changes from the issue's discussion.

[david-allison]

No need to open & close the PR. Fixed today

• Sync Translations workflow: run checks without manual open/close #15887

[david-allison]

Updated to:

---

Important

Maintainers: This PR contains Strings changes

1. Sync Translations before merging this PR and wait for the action to complete
2. Review and merge the auto-generated PR in order to sync all user-submitted translations
3. Sync Translations again and merge the PR so the huge automated string changes caused by merging this PR are by themselves and easy to review

[david-allison]

Updated the URL to:

https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/pulls/mikehardy-machineaccount

[mikehardy]

tidy set of quality-of-life improvements in our automation, considering all the related changes together. Very nice