Project Proposal: Automate upmerges in Git

The Neos Project Project Proposals
1

Background

The upmerges in the git repositories (as documented in Committers Guide) are easy, but if they were automated, that would even be better.

Value for users

  • Having this automated makes the availability of bugfixes in upper branches more predicatble (and is the basis for more regular patch level releases).
  • The need to do this manually is a burden on the Neos developers, removal of this burden frees more time for other (more important) tasks.

Risks

  • If automatic merges fail, this needs to be handled gracefully and reliable notifcations are needed.
  • The results of those merges could be wrong, so some control is probably needed.
4 Likes
2

definitely :+1: for trying this. I think the value would be really high.

3

After having done a number of merges, I have some feedback to share:

  • having that automated would indeed make life easier
  • if someone is really keen on a bugfix, the merge might still be done manually right away :smile:
  • sometimes there are hairy conflicts

So if we put this into place, we would need some new “kitchen duty” to

  • care for notifications on failed merges
  • check the result of merges that were done automatically

The former should be done timely, to not break/postpone following merges. The latter should be rather easy, since frequent merges should be smaller and thus easier to check. The good thing is, everyone can check that, so it’s easily distributed.

1 Like
4

Any news on this one?

5

No, except “even flawless merges sometimes break things big time”. I’m reluctant to automating this… at least thoroughly looking at the merge is a must IMHO.

1 Like
6

Yep agree here, there’s almost always something that needs to be adjusted when doing upmerges unfortunately. It might help having a button that would try and push a PR that could be checked before merging though.

7

Just an idea: I think it would help if upmerges could be done right after a pull request has been merged, because

  • the person who merged the pull request still has an idea about what has been changed and could easily spot merge errors
  • the merged code would be available in master much sooner

Would it be feasible to automatically create a pull request for the upmerge, assign it to the person who merged and then make sure that it’s tackled right away?

But maybe I’m completely missing something here …

8

This would result in a lot of merge commits though. I mean I am not opposed to that in general, I just feel it’s a bit too much maybe.

9

I actually like that idea, upmerging changes you have no idea about can be challenging. Also the more changes the less confident I usually am merging it. Additionally it should avoid more conflicts caused by missing release upmerges e.g. since we’d upmerge more frequently.

However if you’re merging a couple of changes, which is quite often the case, it would be a bit annoying having to approve all of the upmerges. So maybe it should wait a bit of time before doing so?