Mergify impersonates random user — do we want a determinate?

[ulysses4ever]

I described the problem on the Mergify bug tracker Mergifyio/mergify#5038

They say it's inevitable, but there's an option: instead of a random account use a fixed one (added to config as the update_bot_account option). Do we want a determinate one? I think it'd be less surprising to everyone if we put someone in high rank there. E.g. @Mikolaj would be my choice.

Thoughts?

[Mikolaj]

You nominate me for a bot?

[ffaf1]

Mergify impersonating random users is an excellent setup for a game of Werewolf, but not good for a busy repo as ours.

I too second a fixed account, I too think Mikolaj is a good choice.

[ulysses4ever]

I'm fed up with the messages the bot sends, so I submitted #8830.

[ulysses4ever]

The upstream issue is Mergifyio/mergify#5069 it seems impossible to work around it because stetting account that Mergify will impersonate seems to be a premium feature now.

[Mikolaj]

That's not so bad (for a free service). Shall we close?

[ulysses4ever]

Shall we close?

I'm not sure. These messages (although, not per se the focus of this issue) are so annoying and polluting that I'm short of writing a GitHub bot that would shoot down them! If only I could program…

[ulysses4ever]

The rebasing issue as reported on the Mergify bug tracker became really pressing recently:

• Can't embark on merge train: Unable to update: user X is unknown. Mergifyio/mergify#5075

Quick summary here:

• GitHub API doesn't allow a bot to do certain things including rebasing. So, it has to impersonate real people to work because rebasing is pretty usual:

  • we use rebase to update a PR branch when master went ahead (see Mergify config);
  • we use Mergify queues, and those require rebases in general: the bot tries to create a "merge train" rebasing several PRs one on top of each other (Ibid.).

• Before February 2023 Mergify would impersonate random "authorized users" (users with elevated permissions on the repo), which was annoying but working.

• Since February 2023 they impersonate the PR author by default. The issue is, not every PR author have enough permissions for the whole thing to work. As a result we see errors like the ones reported upstream, which I referenced at the start ("Unable to update: user X is unknown").

• Their description of the change seem to suggest that setting update_bot_account to a user that is logged into Mergify Dashboard (like Mikolaj or myself) should solve the issue.

• People quickly noticed that setting update_bot_account was a premium feature. My experiment here to set that option also seemed to have failed because we don't have premium of course.

• Interestingly, I don't see a mention about this feature being premium in the docs right now (it used to be the case, as you can see in the webarchived version of their documentation; compare with the current version). So, I repeat the experiment here: Mergify: rebase as Mikolaj (fix #8462) #9120