SHORT VERSION
=============

Some of you (myself included) have periodically gotten a bunch of emails about 
GitHub Actions failures.  Sorry about that, folks.  The Elves get persnippity 
sometimes.

* If you regularly update the Libfabric branches in your fork, you should 
probably update in order to get the fixes from today.
* There may also be a stale "pr/update-nroff-generated-man-pages" branch in 
your fork.  You can safely delete it.

MORE DETAIL
===========

The root cause of the first Nroff Elves issue we had was when we renamed the 
default branch from "master" to "main".  

When the first set of man pages came in after the branch name change, the Elves 
dutifully created new nroff pages and pushed them up to the 
"ofiwg/libfabric:pr/update-nroff-generated-man-pages" branch.  The Elves use 
the "hub" command (https://hub.github.com/) to open a new PR when nroff changes 
are necessary, but "hub" essentially got confused by the branch name change and 
refused to make the PR.  So the Elves gave up.

...but then a few minutes later, the Elves tried again (because the Elves run 
on a cron schedule).  This time, the 
"ofiwg/libfabric:pr/update-nroff-generated-man-pages" branch already existed, 
so the Elves gave up again.  

...but then the Elves kept trying again a few minutes later.

It took a day or so, but we updated the Elves to tell "hub" that the base 
branch should be whatever the default branch is for the repo (the Elves 
currently only work in the default branch -- they do not work in the release 
branches).  This worked fine.

...until yesterday, when somehow Elves were being told that the default branch 
for ofiwg/libfabric was "" (when it should be "main").  Hilarity ensued, and we 
got bunches of Github Action failure emails again.

I've now made the following changes to the Nroff Elves:

1. Emit the entire ${{github}} metadata blob into the logs to help troubleshoot 
this kind of stuff in the future.

2. Only run once an hour.  Honestly, if your man pages take a little longer to 
render, it's not a crime.  And if there's urgency, anyone with merge privs on 
the repo can go manually invoke the Nroff Elves at any time.

3. If somehow the base branch name is blank, just assume it should be "main".  
This is lame and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are.

4. The GitHub Elves will now only do meaningful work on the ofiwg/libfabric 
repo.  If you keep your fork's main branch in sync with ofiwg/libfabric, it 
would probably be confusing to have new Nroff Elves-created commits show up in 
your fork with different git hashes than the corresponding Nroff Elves-created 
commits that showed up in the ofiwg/libfabric repo.

Hope that all made sense.  Let me know if you have any questions.

-- 
Jeff Squyres
[email protected]



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