Rely on git changes instead of branches in making PRs

[jdpribula]

Right now multi-gitter relies on the branch to exist to determine if it should make a PR. I would nice to not have to keep branches around for this.

Instead would be more nice if it used git's built in understanding of modified, added, deleted etc. to create a PR.

[lindell]

I would nice to not have to keep branches around for this.

The idea is definitely not that should have to keep any branches around. The default behaviour of multi-gitter close/merge is even to remove the branch.

Instead would be more nice if it used git's built in understanding of modified, added, deleted etc. to create a PR.

I'm not sure what you mean here, could you elaborate of how this would work?

[jdpribula]

I think I know what the issue is now.

On Gitlab the Delete Source Branch checkbox is unchecked when MRs are created by mutli-gitter. To me it looked like when I ran multi-gitter again that it was attempting to make a change again after a merge. If I remove the source branch it shows no data was changed.

INFO[0000] Running on 4 repositories
INFO[0000] Cloning and running script                    repo=repo1
INFO[0001] no data was changed                           repo=repo1 # branch was deleted
INFO[0001] Cloning and running script                    repo=repo2
INFO[0002] no data was changed                           repo=repo2 # branch was deleted
INFO[0002] Cloning and running script                    repo=repo3
INFO[0003] the new branch does already exist             repo=repo3 #  branch was NOT deleted
INFO[0003] Cloning and running script                    repo=repo4
INFO[0004] the new branch does already exist             repo=repo4 #  branch was NOT deleted

For my use case I would want the MR created with the remove_source_branch from the API set to true https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/merge_requests.html#create-mr

[lindell]

Hi again.

Yes, multi-gitter mostly relies on if changes are made to determine if it should create a PR/MR or not. But some scripts are intended to be run multiple times, and it would be impossible for MG to automatically know which. It could for example be a script that updates a dependency or sync some data from an external source. But that has to be up to the script-maker to accommodate for.

When it comes to remove_source_branch I think that is a reasonable default, since it is already set when merging a MR through MG. I did not know that you could set it when also creating them.
https://github.com/lindell/multi-gitter/blob/master/internal/scm/gitlab/gitlab.go#L371-L373

[lindell]

#135 Fixed this.

[lindell]

Released in v0.26.1.