Hi everyone, Github has a bot to create Dependency Update PRs and report security issues called dependabot. I requested INFRA to enable it for Avro so we can benefit of more automation. I am enthusiastic in particular about the multiple language support (so far we can get automatic updates for Java/C#/Python/Ruby/Js. For an example of what it does in practice you can look at the PRs it created automatically on my personal fork of Avro. https://github.com/iemejia/avro/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
We might be getting extra PRs (lots at the beginning) and we have to be cautious about updates that might have unintended consequences for example we should not merge non stable dependency updates (those ending on -rc1 or -beta on Java) that might be proposed or dependencies that committers are aware we should not update to for example there are projects that their main stable version is not the most recent one like Hadoop or dependencies that do not support our ongoing language target version (e.g. Java 11 only deps). Another issue is that these updates might not get a JIRA associated with it so we need to decide if (1) we create one and rename/associate the PR with it, or (2) we just decide not to have JIRAs for dependency updates. I am in the (1) camp but I also can see that it is a lot of extra work for not much in return apart of the nice looking JIRA release notes. Any other issues I might be missing? Other comments?
