Enhancement

What is the enhancement to be made?

When opening a sync PR, if there is a conflict between an intermediate branch and the base/target branch, open the PR anyway.

Why should we make this change? (Business justification? What problem is the feature trying to solve?)

One major benefit of sync-branches is that it makes the sync status of branches visible. Developers can see that a branch is behind because there's an open PR to bring it up to date.

Currently, when using an intermediate branch, sync-branches will fail to open a PR if it's unable to merge source into target. That means that unless users are diligently watching Actions outcomes, a conflict between source and target can be very easily overlooked.

A Concrete Example

Let's say we have branches STABLE and CURRENT and we have sync-branches configured like so...

jobs:
  sync:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: gravwell/sync-branches@v1
        with:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
          PR_CREATE_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.MY_PAT }}
          use_intermediate_branch: true
          source_pattern: STABLE
          target_pattern: CURRENT

What we're doing now

• STABLE receives an update
• sync-branches creates an intermediate branch merge/STABLE_to_CURRENT based on CURRENT
• sync-branches attempts to merge STABLE into merge/STABLE_to_CURRENT
• There's a conflict 😱
• Action Fail

Outcome: Action has failed, no PR.

What this Enhancement proposes we should do instead

• STABLE receives an update
• sync-brances creates an intermediate branch merge/STABLE_to_CURRENT based on STABLE
• sync-branches attempts to merge CURRENT into merge/STABLE_to_CURRENT
• There's a conflict 😱
• sync-branches logs message about the conflict
• sync-branches opens a PR from merge/STABLE_to_CURRENTto CURRENT
• sync-branches adds a comment to the new PR about the conflict it encountered.
• Action success

Outcome: An open PR shows there's a conflcit. User has to merge CURRENT into merge/STABLE_to_CURRENT themselves

Any other comments?

sync-branches should comment on a PR any time it fails to merge. It's totally possible to have a conflict on a source=>intermediate merge. Those should be reported, too.

Enhancement

What is the enhancement to be made?

Avoid the close+open CI kick if the PR hasn't changed.

Why should we make this change? (Business justification? What problem is the feature trying to solve?)

No need to tie up runners or waste minutes if nothing's different on the PR.

Any other comments?

Enhancement

What is the enhancement to be made?

Use core.setOutput() to set outputs available to future workflows

Why should we make this change? (Business justification? What problem is the feature trying to solve?)

When using sync-branches in a workflow, there are situations where it would be useful to know...

• Did we open a PR?
• If we opened a PR, what's its head branch? What's its base branch? What are the shas of those branches?

Any other comments?

Some things we could set...

For each PR affected by a run of sync-branches...

• The name of the source branch
• The name of the target branch
• The URL of the PR
• The head of the PR (since we might be using an intermediate branch)
• The base of the PR (same as target)