On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 6:48 PM Claudio Bantaloukas
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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?

Thanks for the detailed explanation! You definitely brought up a few
points I hadn’t considered. Regarding that specific concern, though,
could we make this an optional feature for people that want it?
Ultimately, a committer has to explicitly trigger the bot anyway, so
the existing workflow would remain completely unaffected.

> 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
>

Reply via email to