Why a merge commit for pull requests?

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#504 15 comments 49 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
32/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
git, github-actions, typescript
Domain
ci-cd, devops

Research direction

Start with the checkout README section linked in the issue and review KSP-CKAN/xKAN-meta_testing#73 for the reported behavior. Determine the intended default and its compatibility implications, then document or implement a decided change with validation covering pull-request checkout behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

See KSP-CKAN/xKAN-meta_testing#73 for details, we've been using this Action and found the automatic creation of a new merge commit extremely surprising and confusing. Our Action wasn't behaving as intended and it was difficult to figure out why. Newer changes from master that had nothing to do with a pull request were being pulled in to that pull request's validation checks and wasting resources. Finally we took a close look at this repo's README and found the recipe to turn this off, implicitly indicating what was happening.

So now I'm curious, what is the perceived benefit of this being the default, rather than checking out the pull request branch head? Could it be changed to do that?

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
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Forks
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Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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