Unable to eat dogfood

[korthout]

At the moment, this repo cannot eat its own dog food because backports will always run into conflicts.

This problem is caused by how GitHub Actions are supposed to be distributed: the artifacts are part of the repo. Each change to the source code leads to changes in the artifacts. These changes are generally committed as part of the pull request that introduces the changes. If multiple changes have been made on the main branch, the artifacts differ from that of previously released versions. Then, these commits cannot be cherry-picked automatically due to conflicts.

I see two potential solutions:

1. don't build the new artifacts in the pull request, but build them automatically with a separate GitHub Action. Note that this action would have to be run on main and release branches to produce artifact changes automatically, commit and push these changes. Additionally, the action should not run on its own commit pushes. One upside to this is that authors no longer need to think about building the artifacts locally and provide them along with the rest of the pull request.
2. split the source from the produced artifacts into separate repositories. This seems extreme because it makes it harder for users to find the source code. This does not have my preference.

[korthout]

There is a downside to option 1: To test pull requests with korthout/backport-action-test, the pull request's head needs to contain the newly build artifacts.

This is not a big downside, because I can always:

• ask the author to do add the artifacts temporarily
• create a temporary branch and build the artifacts there for use in testing
• find a solution to this in backport-action-test (checking out the branch and building a new version in a workflow there)