Clarification on "edited" and "synchronize" values for the "action" property of IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent and PullRequestEvent

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
github, openapi
Domain
api, documentation

Research direction

Start with the linked IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent, and PullRequestEvent documentation and compare their action definitions with the GHArchive /events data described in the issue. Check whether the event specification or archived payload behavior changed between 2015 and 2025; done means documenting clear answers about edited and synchronize, including any relevant version or source distinction.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

documentation

Hello,

I work at Inria and I'm part of the CodeCommons project (which extends Software Heritage).
We're using GHArchive which is an archive of GitHub events that uses the /events api. According to its documentation, GHArchive stores raw events without any post-processing.

Using events from GHArchive, I have tried to estimate the number of modifications on comments and pull requests (pushing new code on a PR) daily but couldn't find any IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent or PullRequestEvent with the action "edited" or "synchronize" from 2015 to 2025. So I have a few questions.

According to the GitHub api documentation, IssueCommentEvent and PullRequestReviewCommentEvent have an "action" property in the payload which has the value "edited" when a comment is edited. Also, PullRequestEvent has "action" property in the payload which can have several values, especially "edited" and "synchronize".

  • Does the "edited" action represent the edition of comments ?
  • Does the "synchronize" action represent the fact of pushing new code to a PR ?
  • Did the specification for these events change ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards

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