I think that implementing this is a good idea in principle. I'm sold. Done well, this could make life easier for committers.
I'm not sure that it lowers the barriers for contributors, however: their pull requests will be met with yet another hurdle to jump. IMHO, we need to put more thought into how this impacts the contributor experience.
But with questions regarding expectations, I wasn't fishing for more requirements. I was querying your expectations with regard to the AC and EF's response.
My best guess is that the handful of AC members that have responded think that this is a good idea. I don't think that anybody other than me has actually said that explicitly, however. So you first step is to build consensus with the AC that this is something worth asking the EMO to invest in and maybe identify some folks to help with an implementation that the EMO can generalize and implement. This, frankly, is the best path forward: prove the concept with one project and then generalize (IT resources notwithstanding).
Regarding the EMO's response... As you well know, implementing a new service will require non-trivial (or at least non-zero) effort to research, implement, maintain, and support. Your characterisation of this as an "easy operation to automate" is unfair (and offensive) to the EF IT staff as trivializes the effort that this will actually take. Implementing this will require non-zero effort, and everything that we add to the stack is a liability that adds to the overall complexity and needs to be supported and maintained by an IT staff that is already working daily miracles.
Wayne
