Automate style guide reviews
When pushing a branch CI runs rubocop. For errors, the build will fail and the developer will know to look into that. He will however need to check the errors in the output of the pipeline.
Furthermore, I think a lot of violations against the style guide could be caught before the merge request gets reviewed for the first time.
We could look into supporting an external service like HoundCI or any other service that supports rubocop. Or we could use something like pronto that has GitLab integration to automatically post comments on the merge request.
Right now pronto would comment on commits instead of diffs in a merge request, so we would need something like #16550 (closed) to be implemented for that.
Pro's
- By using an automated solution like that, the reviewers could focus more on the actual review.
- The developer would notice these issues faster, and could address them before the initial review.
- Even though our reviewers have very trained eyes, I think fewer violations would slip through.
Cons
- The machine-comments miss the human touch that suggestions of a reviewer have. This could be discouraging for new contributors.