[review bot] Add comment to the PR instead of printing something to console that nobody reads

[autoantwort]

Only one comment is added to a PR and then this comment is updated

[autoantwort]

I have tested also at my fork :)

[BillyONeal]

1. I think it would be better to fix the code review comment that is left to do the explaining rather than trying to smash things into a comment.
2. We used to do a comment, and backed that off due to confusion over which specific changes were being commented on, as we were essentially just duplicating the checks UI on top of a system not designed to be the checks UI. Has anything changed about that situation vs. Get the Actions bot out of the PR review business. #29777 when the comment was removed?

[BillyONeal]

Is this related to microsoft/vcpkg-tool#720 ? (As in, if these checks are in the tool can we emit better file/line info which makes the check work better?)

[autoantwort]

I think it would be better to fix the code review comment that is left to do the explaining rather than trying to smash things into a comment.

So do everything as code annotations like the deprecated warnings?

We used to do a comment, and backed that off due to confusion over which specific changes were being commented on, as we were essentially just duplicating the checks UI on top of a system not designed to be the checks UI. Has anything changed about that situation vs. #29777 when the comment was removed?

In the past for every push a new comment/review was generated so that there were multiple review comments after multiple pushes. Now there is only one comment for the latest changes. If the points gets fixed the comment gets removed.

Is this related to microsoft/vcpkg-tool#720 ? (As in, if these checks are in the tool can we emit better file/line info which makes the check work better?)

Hm no not really. We could also emit better file/line info in this PR.

[BillyONeal]

In the past for every push a new comment/review was generated so that there were multiple review comments after multiple pushes. Now there is only one comment for the latest changes. If the points gets fixed the comment gets removed.

Issues with this:

(1) if the bot gets unhappy for some reason, the old comment with inaccurate information is left behind, and sometimes it can be unclear if the content there is current
(2) github aggressively tries to hide old comments

My overall opinion is that what we are doing is a check, so we should exhaust every avenue through the checks system to do what we want, rather than trying to make our own checks UI. If we are going to make our own checks UI that operates through comments, I think we need a concrete list of 'these are the problems we are trying to solve with that and this is why the checks UI can't be fixed to do that'.

If people are confused by our error messages and therefore don't know what to do, moving that error message into a comment doesn't fix the problem. If we've tried everything through the checks and annotations mechanism and consistently as soon as people see the message they know what to do (meaning it is only a visibility problem), then bringing in this sort of comment system might make sense.

It looks like the status quo is that people don't read the warnings or errors because they are (1) confusing, or (2) in a sea of console spew, and all we need to do to get the checks UI to do the right thing is prefix the resulting lines with the right prefixes.

[BillyONeal]

@autoantwort Is this PR still relevant given that there have been a lot of changes to the 'check for mistakes' thing since October 2023?

[BillyONeal]

Closing due to inactivity.