Comment on PR instead of modifying the PR's description

[ruudk]

It would be great if this action could post a comment (and keep that one up to date) instead of modifying the PR description.

[tranhl]

Thanks for the suggestion! 😊
We're absolutely open to the idea!

Could you help me understand how having the branch stack in a comment would better suit your workflow?

[ruudk]

I'm the only one using Git Town in my team. I think my team would be fine with a workflow that just comments on a PR instead of modifying the original PR descriptions. The readme mentions some risks to that. A comment feels safer.

[tranhl]

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight. I can see teams having a preference one way or the other!

I'll add it to the roadmap. Can't make any promises on when this will be done unfortunately as I'm busy as of late.

Aside from this, is there anything else that's in the way of team-wide adoption?

[yaadata]

Hello @tranhl,

I started working on this in in git-town/git-town#4871 (comment) as part of the normal git-town cli. To avoid double effort, maybe we can collaborate on a design that works both for users of the github action and for the cli

[jlisee]

Another vote for this feature! On my first use of this action I was creating the root of a stacked PR, edited my PR description and inadvertently stomped on the edit from the GitHub action.

Moving the stack into a dedicated comments makes it impossible for the automated tooling and users edits to conflict, it also gives team the options of leaving the stack information out of the commit history.

Implementation wise I have worked with an internal tool that did just this and we had no trouble with it. You find the proper comment using the hidden HTML comment and make an API call to update or create as needed.

[tranhl]

This has been implemented by #65 is now available in v1.3.0 and the v1 major version!

The default is still the PR description but you can now customize this behavior with the location input:

- uses: git-town/action@v1
  with:
    location: comment

Let me know if you experience any issues with this. Thanks for helping make Git Town better!