Why is author derived from latest commit?

[blozano-tt]

When person A creates a branch, but person B is the last person to author a commit to it.

Person B will be tagged/notified when the branch is stale.

Why?

[fpicalausa]

My understanding, there is no exact definition of a branch author. It could be:

• the author of first commit since the branch was derived from master,
• the author first commit that is not on any other branch
• the authors of any commit not on master (except perhaps for merge commits or cherry picks)
• the author off any PR attached to the branch
• the author of the commit pointed to by the branch (i.e. last person to commit)
• etc.

Here, the goal is to alert someone that a branch they worked on is going to be dropped. Taking the commit currently pointed at is just a very simple approximation that happens to work well if you have contributors working on separate branches. With mixed contributors it may not work that well.

I assume your question stems from a very practical issue you faced. What would be your suggestion on the best approach?

[blozano-tt]

I was thinking the person who created the branch should be notified.

We faced an issue where engineers were collaborating on the same branch. The branch creator was the true owner of the work, but some other engineer applied some patch or merge commit.

The random engineer who patched the branch gets notified that it’s stale, but in all honesty is not that emotionally involved in keeping the effort alive. ;-)

[blozano-tt]

To answer in your terms. The author of the first commit in the branch makes more sense to me.

[fpicalausa]

I agree that it is a pitfall of the current approach. Here are two other scenarios I've encountered:

• the branch creator left the project; the latest contributor is the current interested person (in this case, the current approach works)
• the branch creator is an automated process that never commits (branch cut-off in case of weekly train releases)

Perhaps it'd be best to have a configurable strategy and let the action user decide on what works best with how they work with github. Thoughts?

[blozano-tt]

Yes that makes perfect sense.
Notify first or last author would be a great setting.

[HKBUSeanTYH]

Hi @fpicalausa, I think this is some what related to the notification mechanism, so I m adding a comment instead of creating a new issue.

Currently it only notifies a singular person (whoever made the last commit) and if the person doesn’t exist, it notifies the default recipient (if configured).

Is there any chance it could be configured to notify the default recipient always as well as whoever is the first/last author? Or maybe add another input variable for storing which users must always be informed besides the author.