[Question] Am I using abandonUnwantedPullRequests Correctly

[matthp4]

I wanted to post this here first before opening a issue in case I was missing something.

My team is hoping to use the ADOS extension parameter 'abandonUnwantedPullRequests' to cleanup/abandon PRs that are not needed or is a older duplicate of a new existing PR. In the case where the PR sits to be reviewed due to other priorities.

However, we've found that the parameter hasn't been cleaning up conflicting dependencies like the example below. Currently each of repo has a .NET source and test project so I'm wondering if that would be a problem with the following known issue 451.

Am I missing something here, or does abandonUnwantedPullRequests not cover my example below?

Currently using V1 Extension (Using V2 will require approval of Org)

Example:
Old: Bump MSTest.TestFramework from 3.4.3 to 3.5.1 // Should Abandon
New: Bump MSTest.TestFramework from 3.4.3 to 3.6.0 // Should Keep

Yaml Task

- task: dependabot@1
   displayName: 'Run Dependabot'
   inputs:
      setAutoComplete: false
      abandonUnwantedPullRequests: true
      targetRepositoryName: ${{ repoName }}
      useUpdateScriptvNext: true # Needed for private nuget feeds while testing
      extraEnvironmentVariables: 'DEPENDABOT_EXTRA_CREDENTIALS=$(registryCredentials);DEPENDABOT_TARGET_BRANCH=${{parameters.targetBranch}};DEPENDABOT_IGNORE_CONDITIONS=$(ignoreDependencies);DEPENDABOT_OPEN_PULL_REQUESTS_LIMIT=${{parameters.pullRequestLimit}}'

[rhyskoedijk]

Short answer: Yes.

It sounds like you are describing the "Superseded by {new_pull_request_id}" scenario, which Task V1 does not handle correctly unfortunately. Task V2 does handle this better in that it will actually abandon the PR in this scenario, but it currently uses the incorrect reason message "Looks like the dependencies have changed" instead of "superseded"; this will be fixed in the future though.

Technically, this could be fixed in V1, but it would require overriding a chunk of the dependabot-core code, so I have personally avoided it in favor of finishing the implementation of V2, which is much easier to handle this scenario in.

[rhyskoedijk]

Task V1 will still abandon unwanted PRs in other scenarios, just not the one you've described.
These are the current scenarios supported in V1:

dependabot-azure-devops/updater/lib/tinglesoftware/dependabot/api_clients/azure_api_client.rb

Lines 293 to 301 in 6743b78

	reason_for_close_comment = {
	dependencies_changed: "Looks like the dependencies have changed",
	dependency_group_empty: "Looks like the dependencies in this group are now empty",
	dependency_removed: "Looks like #{lead_dep_name} is no longer a dependency",
	up_to_date: "Looks like #{lead_dep_name} is up-to-date now",
	update_no_longer_possible: "Looks like #{lead_dep_name} can no longer be updated"
	# ??? => "Looks like these dependencies are updatable in another way, so this is no longer needed"
	# ??? => "Superseded by ##{new_pull_request_id}"
	}.freeze.fetch(reason) + ", so this is no longer needed."