Investigate cherry picking automation

[GCHQ-Developer-530]

Summary

At the moment we're merging work into develop and then cherry picking the commits into V3 develop. There's quite a bit of human error here though as we might miss some commits going into V3. It would be good if there was a way of automating it.

💬 Description

Look into whether we can have a github workflow that:

• Gets triggered after a merge into develop
• Gets any new commit ids
• Cherry picks them into a new branch off V3
• Opens a PR from the new branch to V3 develop

Also make the same workflow on the design system repo too.

Why do we need it?

Reduce the likelihood of skipping commits when cherry picking.

[evenstensberg]

Can I fix this?

[GCHQ-Developer-530]

Hi @evenstensberg, yeah of course, go for it! As long as it's all standard action work and no third party usage, then that'd be great

[evenstensberg]

@GCHQ-Developer-530 Okay, great. Why don't you just git rebase develop v3 from the develop branch instead of cherry-picking?

[GCHQ-Developer-530]

We previously had an action doing that, however there were always too many merge conflicts and we'd have to do it manually. We noticed that a couple of times work went missing by us doing it manually, so cherry picking is the best way moving forward.

[evenstensberg]

Ok.

Resources

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11835948/git-cherry-pick-vs-rebase
• https://github.com/gorillio/github-action-cherry-pick
• https://github.com/marketplace/actions/github-cherry-pick-action

[evenstensberg]

I'll fix this after #2617 is merged.

[GCHQ-Developer-530]

We need to get #2617 checked by someone internally who is currently on leave so that PR is on hold for a bit. We'd like to get this one resolved as soon as possible as it's slowing the team down.

[evenstensberg]

@GCHQ-Developer-530 let me know if you have any issues/questions.

The action should be up and running after you've added the GitHub credentials and enabled the action.

[ad9242]

Currently having some issues with permissions trying to push the newly created branch: eg: https://github.com/mi6/ic-ui-kit/actions/runs/11701936408/job/32589576253

moved back to "ready for dev" for further investigation

[evenstensberg]

@ad9242 I can't change any permissions myself, but I can find articles/links to what needs to be adjusted in the GitHub settings(?)

Edit: Issue is fixed, feel free to close.

[ad9242]

the action seems to squash multiple commits from the initial PR into a single one, so we currently need to find a way to maintain all the original commits

EDIT: we think it's just getting the final merge commit

[evenstensberg]

I’ve read the docs and it doesn’t support cherry picking each commit from a pr. I’ll see if there’s some other actions that supports that

Update: I've done some googling and it seems that all the cherry-pick actions use the merge commit and not the individual commits on the branch, so I think you will need to cherry-pick manually if this isn't the way to go.

Update: You could just re-submit the PRs you merge to the v3/develop branch, the commit ids are the same, no?