bot for refreezing

Proposed change

Every once in a while, we want to rebuild the base environments. This is done by running the freeze.py script in the conda buildpack.

Alternative options

keep manually refreezing

Who would use this feature?

Maintainers of repo2docker and folks contributing updates to the base environments who don't want to run refreeze themselves.

One way is to do periodic refreeze, to keep things up to date, as is done with henchbot. Another is to allow pull requests to update the environment spec or other files and then post a comment like @r2d-bot please refreeze.

How much effort will adding it take?

Not sure! Hopefully not too much. Requires writing a bot that talks to the GitHub API. It would need to:

1. respond to a trigger somehow (e.g. a @refreeze-bot please refreeze comment to update a PR or a new please refreeze Issue to trigger a new PR)
2. make a commit in an existing pull request and/or open a new pull request

Who can do this work?

• Interest in / knowledge of the GitHub API
• Interest in / knowledge of writing bots and deploying them somewhere (on heroku, etc.)

References:

• henchbot which does pull requests for updates to repo2docker and binderhub for mybinder.org
• conda-forge-admin bot which does things like add commits to pull requests to run common commands like @conda-forge-admin please rerender