A workflow "bot" that would apply formatting fixes and create a PR against a PR?

[dweiss]

Description

There are more different tools now used to harness code quality. I wonder if it'd be possible to create a workflow that would:

• run a set of designated formatting-validation tasks,
• if these fail, apply automatic fixes (like the tidy task), try to rerun formatting validation tasks again,
• if the fixes are successful, file a pull request against the original repository/branch (a PR against a PR).

We could even make this workflow an opt-in - using "commands" like the ones dependabot uses.

This is just an idea for anybody willing to play with it - I have no experience with such workflows and I probably won't have the time to dig deep into this. It seems like a fun task though.

[rmuir]

We could also try e.g. --format github option of tools to get better integration. I think they typically use "annotations" and might be much more friendly I'm not sure how autofixes look but it might be an easy win, and I think many tools support "reporters" that are compatible with this.

screenshot of unrelated tool so you know what i mean by annotation:

Currently all tools just print to the console in CI.

We can try it out with ast-grep as an experiment

[dweiss]

This looks nice.

Currently all tools just print to the console in CI.

Not all of them - this one creates a report that's part of the workflow's result -
https://github.com/apache/lucene/actions/runs/15533320029