In the context of Source Control, what is Commit Automation?
I read recently that Google Network tool engineers don't really use branching, facinated I started to read about the Google single monolithic repo. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext
And read this comment:
The commits-per-week graph shows the commit rate was dominated by human users until 2012, at which point Google switched to a custom-source-control implementation for hosting the central repository, as discussed later. Following this transition, automated commits to the repository began to increase. Growth in the commit rate continues primarily due to automation.
So my question is, what is 'Commit Automation'?
See "Google Is 2 Billion Lines of Code—And It’s All in One Place":
At the same time, Piper must work to remove much of the burden from human coders. It must ensure that humans can wrap their heads around all that code; that they don’t step on each other’s toes with code changes; that they can readily remove bugs and unused code from the repository. And because all of this is so difficult, it must actually take some of that work away from the humans. Now that Google has switched to Piper from its previous version control system—a tool called Perforce—automated ‘bots handle a majority of the commits.
This doesn’t mean ‘bots are writing code. But they are generating a lot of the data and configuration files needed to run the company’s software. “You need to make a concerted effort to maintain code health,” Potvin says. “And this is not just humans maintaining code health, but robots too.”