[ovirt-devel] Re: github testing: merge with branch, or use PR HEAD?

Hi all, I was annoyed for some time now by the fact that when I used some github-CI-generated RPMs, with a git hash in their names, I could never find this git hash anywhere - not in my local git repo, nor in github. Why is it so? Because, if I got it right, the default for 'actions/checkout@v2' is to merge the PR HEAD with the branch HEAD. See e.g. [1]: HEAD is now at 7bbb40c9a Merge 026bb9c672bf46786dd6d16f4cbe0ecfa84c531d into 35e217936b5571e9657946b47333a563373047bb Meaning: my patch was 026bb9c, master was 35e2179, and the generated RPMs will have 7bbb40c9a, not to be found anywhere else. If you check the main PR page [3], you can find there '026bb9c', but not '7bbb40c9a'. (Even 026bb9c might require some effort, e.g. "didib force-pushed the add-hook-log-console branch 2 times, most recently from c90e658 to 66ebc88 yesterday". I guess this is the result of github discouraging force-pushes, in direct opposite of gerrit, which had a notion of different patchsets for a single change. I already ranted about this in the past, but that's not the subject of the current message). This is not just an annoyance, it's a real difference in semantics. In gerrit/jenkins days, IIRC most/all projects I worked on, ran CI testing/building on the pushed HEAD, and didn't touch it. Rebase, if at all, happened either explicitly, or at merge time.

actions/checkout's default, to auto-merge, is probably meant to be more "careful" - to test what would happen if the code is merged. I agree this makes sense. But I personally think it's almost always ok to test on the pushed HEAD and not rebase/merge _implicitely_. What do you think?

It should be easy to change, using [2]: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 with: ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }}