[python-committers] Issues with hundreds of commits being opened and closed -- what's going on?

[Zachary Ware]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 6:21 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Occasionally I receive a sequence of emails from GitHub where a PR is
> requesting my review by some user, the-knights-who-say-ni responds with a
> CLA request, and then Bedevere closes it, without comment. Latest example:
> https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/5693
>
> This seems to be some kind of user error -- the GitHub description is
> typically something like "<user> wants to merge 398 commits into master from
> 3.5". But this happens so frequently I would like to prevent this user error
> from happening in the first place.
>
> Does anyone understand what these users are doing that causes such PRs to be
> created?

This is because GitHub allows anyone logged into the site to click the
"New pull request" button on the branches page
(https://github.com/python/cpython/branches).  I reported this to
GitHub several months ago and the last word was that they were
"discussing it internally"; I'll bug them about it again.

-- 
Zach