On 22/09/2026 16:59, Yuao Ma wrote:
Hi!
Currently, while the forge experiment allows us to conduct code
reviews and run CI, landing approved patches still requires pushing
manually via the CLI.
I am wondering if we could enable the bot account to push/merge
patches on our behalf. A good precedent for this is OpenJDK's
workflow, which uses the Skara bot (open-sourced at
https://github.com/openjdk/skara). For example, contributors can
trigger integration directly from the PR interface:
https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/32721#issuecomment-5749064779
Could we explore doing something similar here? Thoughts and feedback
are welcome.
Hi Yuao,
thank you for your interest in gcc development and the use of the forge
for making your contributions.
In the past year me and others tried to bridge contributions on the
forge with the mailing list by making sure that everything done on the
forge gets emailed. Some hiccups occurred but it seems to me that the
process has been working well enough for a while now. I'd love to get
feedback that this is not the case so I can address it BTW.
With that in place, the question becomes how to get more value out of
the forge by making it easier to merge changes done there with minimal
interaction.
This is IMO one of the main reasons why more people are not engaging
with the forge. It makes little sense to use a web based system only to
then have to manually merge the patches on the git repo. The missing
value is the ability to merge (that is, do a fast forward and then
merge, failing in the presence of conflicts, perhaps running some basic
smoke tests before the final merge) with a single command, that should
ideally be a single click on the UI or invoking "fj pr merge".
Thank you for the link to the openjdk bot. It has some interesting ideas
on commands that are possible with an automation like the one we have.
The issues we face though are not purely technical. There are many bots
that do merge trains and batrachomyomachia could do the same thing. The
question is one of trust: is the gcc community happy with a bot doing
merges for them? would they accept automatic rebases? what about rebases
in the presence of signed commits?
This and other issues should be discussed with people and Richard's talk
at the cauldron will be a good opportunity to cover them.
I'd love to be there but personal reasons might make this hard. I'll
only know later. :(
Cheers,
Claudio
