Action reports success even when it failed to merge about automerge-action HOT 4 CLOSED

I'm not sure if the action should fail in this case, because then it could happen that GH cannot merge the PR, depending on the configured required actions. Failure should only happen in the case of authentication failure, network timeout when calling the API and similar, IMO.

Maybe #36 could help instead?

from automerge-action.

I'm sorry I can't quite follow that argument.

You're saying that, if the action were to fail, "it could happen that GH cannot merge the PR" - but isn't that precisely what the action itself tried to do? You kick it off with the expectation to have it merge a PR. Now, when that cannot happen due to any number of issues - the merge failed. So if the merge never happened, I don't see how that could be considered a successful run of a "merge" action.

depending on the configured required actions

I'm assuming you mean branch protection rules and required checks?

If someone configured an automerge action as a "required check" for a PR to be merged, that's a misconfiguration (user error) and you don't have to consider it. It makes no sense to me, even currently, to require a merge to succeed in order to allow a merge - if it succeeded, there's no need or even ability to merge the exact same PR again. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.

#36 could serve as a workaround - although I really would prefer a default behavior, or at the very least option, of failing anytime it didn't succeed. In the end, it doesn't matter whether the merge failed due to API rate limiting being hit or due to required checks being in progress -> the outcome is no merge was done, aka the merge step failed.

from automerge-action.

I'm still not sure about this. I understand that it does look weird to report "success", even though the action did not do anything. Previously, GH actions had a "neutral exit", which would be correct in this case, but they never introduced an alternative for the new actions (they said they will, but that was almost half a year ago).

For now, I don't think that it would be helpful when e.g. CircleCI failed (unit tests failed) and the automerge-action also reports failure, because then 2 actions will be unsuccessful, when it's really only 1 issue that needs to be addressed (fix unit tests).

I could think about an option like MERGE_REPORT_FAILURE or so, but I'm still not convinced of the usefulness

from automerge-action.

It's a long time since there was some activity in this issue, so I will close it for now. If you have any new information or need any help, feel free to reopen it!

from automerge-action.