• IMP: allow creating forward ports before merging the source pull request

• IMP: allow non-reviewer employees to set the merge method on the PRs they create

  Previously this was only allowed for reviewers actual (note: not necessarily
  the PR's own), but when the reviewer is busy and the PR is blocked on just the
  merge method it can be frustrating. However because the merge method has commit
  impliciation via the PR description (squash/merge/rebase-merge) giving access to
  any author might be a bit too relaxed.

• IMP: outstanding classification

  Forward ports are now considered "outstanding" if they were created more than
  ~a week ago, previously they would be counted as outstanding if their source was
  merged more than a week ago (so for difficult forward ports they'd all be
  considered outstanding leading to unnecessary reminders).

• IMP: reminder interval is now tracked by each forward port

  Previously it was tracked on the source, which made sense when the notification
  was on the source, but not since the reminder is per-forward-port. However this
  also means brand new forward ports start at 0 instead of wherever the reminder
  source PR last got from their predecessors.

• IMP: the reminder interval has been capped at ~1 month, but increased in the initial phase

  Previously the reminder interval would start at 1 day for about a week, then
  double every time, quickly increasing to less than yearly.

  The reminder interval is now weekly for the first month, then monthly.

2024-08

• IMP: PR descriptions are now markdown-rendered in the dashboard

  Previously the raw text was displayed. The main advantage of rendering, aside
  from not splatting huge links in the middle of the thing, is that we can
  autolink odoo tasks if they're of a pattern we recognize. Some support has
  also been added for github's references to mirror GFM rendering.

  This would be a lot less useful (and in fact pretty much useless) if we could
  use github's built-in references to external resources
  sadly that seems to not be available on our plan.

2023-12

• ADD: projects now know how to prioritise new PRs over splits

  While this likely has relatively low utility, we'll look at how it performs
  during periods of high throughput.

• ADD: stagings can now be disabled on a per-project basis

  Currently stopping stagings requires stopping the staging cron(s), which causes
  several issues:

  • the staging cron runs very often, so it can be difficult to find a window to
    deactivate it (as the cron runner acquires an exclusive lock on the cron)
  • the staging cron is global, so it does not disable staging only on the
    problematic project (to say nothing of branch) but on all of them

  The latter is not currently a huge issue as only one of the mergebot-tracked
  projects is ultra active (spreadsheet activity is on the order of a few
  single-PR stagings a day), but the former is really annoying when trying to
  stop runaway broken stagings.

• CHG: complete rework of the commands system

  fun is dead: strict commands parsing

  Historically the bots would apply whatever looked like a command and ignore the
  rest. This led to people sending novels to the bot, then being surprised the bot
  found a command in the mess.

  The bots now ignore all lines which contain any non-command. Example:

  @robodoo r+ when green darling

  Previously, the bot would apply the r+ and ignore the rest. Now the bot will
  ignore everything and reply with

  unknown command "when"

  fwbot is dead

  The mergebot (@robodoo) is now responsible for the old fwbot commands:

  • close, ignore, up to, ... work as they ever did, just with robodoo
  • robodoo r+ now approves the parents if the current PR a forward port
  • a specific PR can be approved even in forward ports by providing its number
    e.g. robodoo r=45328 will approve just PR 45328, if that is the PR the
    comment is being posted on or one of its parents
  • the approval of forward ports won't skip over un-approvable PRs anymore
  • the rights of the original author have been restricted slightly: they can
    only approve the direct descendents of merged PRs, so if one of the parents
    has been modified and is not merged yet, the original author can't approve,
    nor can they approve the modified PR, or a conflicting PR which has to get
    fixed (?)

  no more p=

  The old priorities command was a tangle of multiple concerns, not all of which
  were always desired or applicable. These tangles have been split along their
  various axis.

  listing

  The new commands are:

  • default, sets the staging priority back to the default
  • priority, sets the staging priority to elevated, on staging these PRs are
    staged first, then the normal PRs are added
  • alone, sets the staging priority to high, these PRs are staged before
    considering splits, and only alone PRs are staged together even if the batch
    is not full
  • fw=default, processes forward ports normally
  • fw=skipci, once the current PR has been merged creates all the forward ports
    without waiting for each to have valid statuses
  • fw=skipmerge, immediately create all forward ports even if the base pull
    request has not even been merged yet
  • skipchecks, makes the entire batch (target PR and any linked PR) immediately
    ready, bypassing statuses and reviews
  • cancel, cancels the staging on the target branch, if any

2023-10

• IMP: allow setting forward-port limits after the source pull request has been merged

  Should now be possible to both extend and retract the forward port limit
  afterwards, though obviously no shorter than the current tip of the forward
  port sequence. One limitation is that forward ports being created can't be
  stopped so there might be some windows where trying to set the limit to the
  current tip will fail (because it's in the process of being forward-ported to
  the next branch).

2023-08

• ADD: stagings reverse index (from commits)

  Finding out the commits from a staging is not great but it's easy enough, the
  reverse was difficult and very inefficient. Splat out the "heads" JSON field
  into two join tables, and provide both ORM methods and a JSON endpoint to
  lookup stagings based on their commits.

• IMP: added quick jump from staging to PR in the backend

  In the backend, going through the batches to reach a PR is really not
  convenient, directly displaying both github URL and frontend URL for each PR
  makes jumping around much easier.

• IMP: optimize home page

  An unnecessary deopt and a few opportunities were found and fixed in the home
  page / main dashboard, a few improvements have been implemented which should
  significantly lower the number of SQL queries and the time needed to generate
  the page.

• IMP: outstandings page

  • increased time-before-outstanding from 3 to 7 days, as 3~4 days is common in
    normal operations, especially when merging from very low branches were
    forward-porting may take a while
  • improved performances by optimising fetching & filtering
  • added counts to the main listing for clarity (instead of hiding them in a
    popover)
  • added the original authors for the outstanding forward ports
  • added ability to filter by team, if such are configured

2022-10

• ADD: enable "squash" merge mode for multi-commit PRs

  After 4 years, the world is apparently ready. Squashing tries to preserve
  authorship, depending on the number of authors (and committers) on the PR.
  Squashing does not preserve any part of existing commit messages.

• FIX: creation of forward-port PRs for new (freeze) branches in edge cases

• FIX: lock in statuses at the end of a staging

  The statuses of a staging are computed dynamically. Because github associates
  statuses with commits, rebuilding a staging (partially or completely) or using
  one of its commits for a branch could lead to the statuses becoming inconsistent
  with the staging e.g. all-green statuses while the staging had failed.

  By locking in the status at the end of the staging, the dashboard is less
  confusing and more consistent, and post-mortem analysis (e.g. of staging
  failures) easier.

• FIX: stop pinging the forwardbot on forward-port PRs

  Also ping the reviewer of the original PR.

• IMP: make timestamps and batch labels selectable

  In the list of stagings for a branch, the timestamps and batch labels were not
  selectable, which was inconvenent for cross-referencing and copy/pasting. They
  should now be selectable.

• REV: don't automatically close PRs when their branch is disabled

  Turns out that breaks FW chains and makes existing forward ports harder to
  manage, so revert that bit. Do keep sending a message on the PR tho.

2022-06

• ADD: automated provisioning of accounts from odoo.com

• FIX: correctly handle PR empty PR descriptions

  Github's webhook for this case are weird, and weren't handled correctly,
  updating a PR's description to or from empty might be mishandled.

• FIX: properly unstage pull requests when they're retargeted (base branch is changed)

• IMP: automatically close PRs when their target branch is deactivated

  Leave a message on the PRs to explain, such PRs should also be reopen-able if
  the users wants to retarget them.

• IMP: flag detached PRs in their dashboard

• IMP: notifications when reopening a closed forward-port (e.g. indicate that they're detached)

• IMP: review pinging (@-notification) of users by the mergebot and forwardbot

  The bots should more consistently ping users when they need some sort of action to proceed.

• IMP: show current alerts (disabled crons) on the PR pages

• IMP: use the diff3 conflict style, should make forward port conflicts clearer and easier to fix

• IMP: various UI items

  • more clearly differentiate between "pending" and "unknown" statuses on stagings
  • fix "outstanding forward ports" count
  • add date of staging last modification (= success / failure instant)
  • correctly retrieve and include fast-forward and unstaging reasons
  • show the warnings banner (e.g. staging disabled) on the PR pages, as not all
    users routinely visit the main dashboard

2021-10

• ADD: a changelog feature you can now see here

• ADD: squash-mode, currently only for single-commit PRs to make it easier to edit commit messages when they're incorrectly formatted

• CHG: reject reviewers without an email configured, the fallback to @users.noreply.github.com turns out to be confusing

• FIX: allow delegate reviewers on forward ports to approve the followups, it worked fine for delegates on the original pull request but a delegation on a forward port would only work for that specific PR (note: only works if the followups don't already exist)

• FIX: correctly display the error message when a PR is in error

• FIX: don't rewrite commit titles, this can lead to odd effects when it's incorrectly formatted and interpreted as a pseudo-header

• FIX: don't trigger an error message when using fw-bot r+ and some of the PRs were already approved

• FIX: ensure the merge message matches the up-to-date PR descriptions, the two could desync if we'd missed an update

• FIX: rare condition where updating a forwardport would then require all followups to be individually approved

• IMP: add reviewer and direct link to backend in PR pages

• IMP: allow delegate reviewers to set merge methods

• IMP: layout and features of the "outstanding forward port" page, show the oldest-merged PRs first and allow filtering by reviewer

2021-09

• ADD: better localisation of conflicts in multi-PR commits, list all the commits in the comment and add an arrow pointing to the one which broke

• ADD: list of outstanding forward-ports

• ADD: mergebot should not accept merging draft PR anymore

• ADD: refuse merging commits without an email set, this is mostly to be used by the forwardport-bot

• ADD: when integrating a PR via rebasing, tag all the commits with the source PR so they're easier to find

• FIX: loss of authorship on conflicts in multi-commit PRs, such conflicts now generate a commit with no authorship information, which can not be merged

• FIX: some feedback messages didn't correctly ping the person being replied to

• FIX: the deduplication of authorship in case of conflicts in multi-commit PRs

• FIX: two PRs with the same label in different projects should not be considered linked anymore

• FIX: when a PR fails at staging, link the correct status in the message posted on the PR

• FIX: when fetching an unknown PR and it's closed, don't lose that information

• IMP: add the forward-port remote to the repository view, so it can be set via the UI

• IMP: cleanup timestamp displays, always show the tzoffset, UTC on hover in the main page (easier to relate to logs), local in the per-branch listing

• IMP: error messages when trying to @fw-bot r+ on pull requests not under its purview

• IMP: keep showing linked PRs after a PR has been merged

• IMP: properly notify the user when an update to a pull request causes a conflict when impacted on the followup

• REM: creation of forward ports in draft mode