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feat(runway): git merger PROMOTE - #462

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feat(runway): git merger PROMOTE#462
behinddwalls wants to merge 1 commit into
preetam/runway-git-merger-squash-mergefrom
preetam/runway-git-merger-promote

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@behinddwalls behinddwalls commented Jul 29, 2026

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Summary

Why?

PROMOTE is the last strategy in the wire contract without an apply path. It is also the one that does not fit the shared machinery: the transforming strategies build new commits locally and push HEAD:target, while PROMOTE advances the target to a commit that already exists, unchanged.

What?

Adds the promote path, dispatched directly from process rather than through applyTransforming.

Fast-forward only. After resetting to the remote tip, promote classifies the named commit three ways. Already the tip, or contained in it — idempotent success, no push. A strict descendant of the tip — a genuine fast-forward, pushed as <sha>:refs/heads/<target>. Anything else has diverged and is a terminal ErrConflict; PROMOTE never creates a commit to reconcile the two.

Because it moves the ref to an existing commit, a change of any size arrives whole by construction — its ancestry comes with it, so PROMOTE needs none of the range machinery the picking strategies do.

Exclusivity. resolveAndValidate rejects a PROMOTE that is not the entire request — one step, one change, one URI — as ErrInvalidRequest. Two reasons, both structural: a pre-existing commit cannot descend from commits an earlier transforming step just produced, and the push targets an exact SHA rather than the locally-built HEAD, so there is nothing for a preceding step to contribute.

Its own availability checks. promote bypasses tryApply, so it performs the object-availability and staleness checks itself. Without them a commit the remote cannot supply makes every containment query fail with a plain error, which the consumer retries forever rather than reporting a request that can never succeed.

Contention. The same bounded retry as the transforming path, but the loop re-runs the classification rather than the apply: if the push is rejected the tip may have moved, and the commit that was a fast-forward a moment ago may now be contained (success) or divergent (conflict).

The push is a single atomic ref update, so PROMOTE needs no separate atomicity argument. A dry-run check performs the identical classification and returns without pushing, reporting no output.

With this the merger implements every strategy in the contract; isConcreteStrategy now admits all four.

Test Plan

bazel test //runway/extension/merger/git:go_default_test — passes (61s)

New cases: fast-forward promote, promote of a commit already contained in the tip, divergent promote rejected as a conflict, a multi-commit change promoted whole to the exact named commit, an unavailable commit reported as an invalid request rather than retried, both dry-run classifications, and the two composition rules (PROMOTE with a second step, PROMOTE with a second URI) rejected as invalid requests.

Stack

  1. feat(runway): dlq reconciler for merge topics #459
  2. feat(runway): git-backed merger with REBASE #460
  3. feat(runway): git merger SQUASH_REBASE and MERGE #461
  4. @ feat(runway): git merger PROMOTE #462
  5. feat(runway): wire the git merger into the server #463
  6. feat(runway): reject changes that disagree on provider #476
  7. docs: define the URI as the unit of change #477

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behinddwalls added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 30, 2026
## Summary

### Why?

SubmitQueue records in-flight merge work before publishing and then
waits for exactly one `MergeResult` echoing its correlation id. Runway
is stateless and the sole responder on that id, so every request must
resolve to a result — or the client waits forever.

The primary controllers resolve what they can name: conflicts and
invalid requests become a `FAILED` result, infrastructure faults are
nacked for retry. But a fault that never recovers exhausts the retry
budget and dead-letters. Nothing consumed those dead-letter topics, so
the request produced no signal at all and the client's correlation id
hung indefinitely.

### What?

Adds `runway/controller/dlq`, a reconciler that subscribes to an inbound
topic's `_dlq` queue and, for each dead-lettered `MergeRequest`,
republishes a `FAILED` `MergeResult` echoing the correlation id to the
corresponding signal topic. `dlq.TopicKey` derives the DLQ topic key
from the primary one so the two stay in lockstep.

Unlike the SubmitQueue and Stovepipe DLQ reconcilers this one writes no
entity state — Runway has none, and the signal *is* the resolution. A
payload that cannot be decoded carries no correlation id and is dropped
rather than retried forever.

Wires two instances in the server (one per inbound topic) on a dedicated
consumer running under `errs.AlwaysRetryableProcessor`, so a transient
publish failure retries indefinitely rather than dead-lettering the
dead-letter. The DLQ consumer is started alongside the primary one and
stopped with the same 30s drain on shutdown; both stop errors are joined
into the exit status.

## Test Plan

✅ `bazel test //runway/...` — 5/5 pass, including new
`//runway/controller/dlq` coverage for republish-on-dead-letter, the
drop-undecodable-payload path, and publish-failure propagation
✅ `bazel build //service/runway/...` — wiring compiles
✅ `make gazelle`, `make fmt`


## Stack
1. @ #459
1. #460
1. #461
1. #462
1. #463
1. #476
1. #477
behinddwalls added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 30, 2026
## Summary

### Why?

PR #443 disabled this workflow outright (`if: false`) when the repo moved to GitHub's native stacked PRs. That was too blunt: native stacks and hand-rolled `arh` chains coexist here today. Stacks #470, #472 and #474 are native, while #460#461#462#463#476 is a plain chain whose every member reports `stack: null`. With the workflow off, merging any PR in a hand-rolled chain leaves the children still carrying their parent's commits — precisely the broken-diff problem this workflow was written to fix.

GitHub owns the lifecycle of its own stacks: on a partial merge it rebases and retargets the surviving members itself, so the workflow must not touch those. It only needs to tell the two apart rather than give up on both.

### What?

Re-enables the job and skips only the PRs GitHub actually owns, instead of switching the whole workflow off.

A `detect_stack` helper resolves native-stack membership from `GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/{n}`. It queries the REST API at run time rather than reading `github.event.pull_request.stack` off the webhook payload, so a PR added to a stack after the merge event was queued is still recognised. Membership survives merge — a merged member still reports its stack — which is what makes the lookup meaningful at this point in the lifecycle.

The check is applied **per child PR**, not to the merged PR. GitHub only ever rebases a stack's own members; a PR that targets a member's head branch without joining the stack is invisible to that machinery. Skipping the whole chain whenever the merged PR happened to be a stack member would therefore strand such a PR with exactly the broken diff this workflow exists to prevent. `rebase_chain` always runs; each child that is a stack member is skipped and not recursed into, while its siblings rebase normally. Membership of the merged PR is logged for context and gates nothing.

Presence is tested on the `stack` object itself rather than on `stack.number`. Probing a sub-field means a stack object arriving without that field reads as "standalone" and gets force-pushed — the unsafe direction to fail in. The number is used only for logging. An unreadable response still falls back to standalone, since the Stacks API 404s when the feature is not enabled for a repo, which is exactly when the rebase is wanted.

`cleanup_orphaned_merged_branches` still runs on every merge, including those where every child turned out to be GitHub's to rebase. This workflow therefore remains the sole owner of head-branch deletion, and native-stack head branches are reaped here too, each on the first merge after GitHub has retargeted its successors off it.

This depends on "Automatically delete head branches" being OFF, as the header has always documented — otherwise GitHub retargets children to `main` before the job runs and the non-native path silently no-ops on a green job. The setting has been turned off on the repo.

## Test Plan

✅ YAML parses; job `if` and step `env` verified after the edit.

✅ `bash -n` clean on the extracted `run:` block under bash 5.2, the version Actions runners use. Note for future edits: macOS `/bin/bash` 3.2 reports a spurious `syntax error near ';;'` on this script — it cannot parse the heredoc nested in `$( )`, so it blames a line far from the real construct.

✅ `actionlint` v1.7.7 — clean.

✅ `zizmor` v1.25.2 (`--no-online-audits`, the version CI pins) — no findings, 2 ignored and 5 suppressed, confirming the existing `.github/zizmor.yml` exceptions still cover the file.

✅ `yamlfmt` v0.16.0 `-lint` — clean.

✅ `detect_stack` exercised against live PRs in this repo:

| PR | `.stack` | Result |
| --- | --- | --- |
| #467 | stack #470, position 4/6, merged | native → skipped |
| #468 | stack #470, position 5/6, open | native → skipped |
| #404 | stack #472 | native → skipped |
| #457 | stack #475, size 1 | native → skipped |
| #443 | `null` | standalone → rebased |
| #460 | `null` | standalone → rebased |
| #999999 | HTTP 404 | warns, treated as standalone, no `set -euo pipefail` abort |

✅ The sub-field trap verified directly: a synthetic `{"stack":{"id":51488,"position":4,"size":6}}` with no `number` reads as standalone under `.stack.number // empty`, and as in-a-stack under the expression shipped here.

✅ Observed reference case — the merge of #467 (position 4 of stack #470). GitHub retargeted #468 from `preetam/stovepipe-buildsignal-outcome` to `main` and left #469 on #468's branch, confirming both that GitHub handles its own members and that a merged member retains its `stack` object.

The rebase itself can only be exercised post-merge. On the next merge of a hand-rolled chain (the runway series is the live case) watch for `=== Stack rebase complete ===` and a child retargeted with only its own commits; on a native-stack merge watch for each member child logging `skipped: belongs to native stack #N`, followed by the branch sweep. The first sweep will also reap `preetam/stovepipe-buildsignal-outcome`, which is currently orphaned — it merged after auto-delete was turned off and has no open dependents.
behinddwalls added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 30, 2026
## Summary

### Why?

PR #443 disabled this workflow outright (`if: false`) when the repo
moved to GitHub's native stacked PRs. That was too blunt: native stacks
and hand-rolled `arh` chains coexist here today. Stacks #470, #472 and
#474 are native, while #460#461#462#463#476 is a plain chain
whose every member reports `stack: null`. With the workflow off, merging
any PR in a hand-rolled chain leaves the children still carrying their
parent's commits — precisely the broken-diff problem this workflow was
written to fix.

GitHub owns the lifecycle of its own stacks: on a partial merge it
rebases and retargets the surviving members itself, so the workflow must
not touch those. It only needs to tell the two apart rather than give up
on both.

### What?

Re-enables the job and skips only the PRs GitHub actually owns, instead
of switching the whole workflow off.

A `detect_stack` helper resolves native-stack membership from `GET
/repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/{n}`. It queries the REST API at run time
rather than reading `github.event.pull_request.stack` off the webhook
payload, so a PR added to a stack after the merge event was queued is
still recognised. Membership survives merge — a merged member still
reports its stack — which is what makes the lookup meaningful at this
point in the lifecycle.

The check is applied **per child PR**, not to the merged PR. GitHub only
ever rebases a stack's own members; a PR that targets a member's head
branch without joining the stack is invisible to that machinery.
Skipping the whole chain whenever the merged PR happened to be a stack
member would therefore strand such a PR with exactly the broken diff
this workflow exists to prevent. `rebase_chain` always runs; each child
that is a stack member is skipped and not recursed into, while its
siblings rebase normally. Membership of the merged PR is logged for
context and gates nothing.

Presence is tested on the `stack` object itself rather than on
`stack.number`. Probing a sub-field means a stack object arriving
without that field reads as "standalone" and gets force-pushed — the
unsafe direction to fail in. The number is used only for logging. An
unreadable response still falls back to standalone, since the Stacks API
404s when the feature is not enabled for a repo, which is exactly when
the rebase is wanted.

`cleanup_orphaned_merged_branches` still runs on every merge, including
those where every child turned out to be GitHub's to rebase. This
workflow therefore remains the sole owner of head-branch deletion, and
native-stack head branches are reaped here too, each on the first merge
after GitHub has retargeted its successors off it.

This depends on "Automatically delete head branches" being OFF, as the
header has always documented — otherwise GitHub retargets children to
`main` before the job runs and the non-native path silently no-ops on a
green job. The setting has been turned off on the repo.

## Test Plan

✅ YAML parses; job `if` and step `env` verified after the edit.

✅ `bash -n` clean on the extracted `run:` block under bash 5.2, the
version Actions runners use. Note for future edits: macOS `/bin/bash`
3.2 reports a spurious `syntax error near ';;'` on this script — it
cannot parse the heredoc nested in `$( )`, so it blames a line far from
the real construct.

✅ `actionlint` v1.7.7 — clean.

✅ `zizmor` v1.25.2 (`--no-online-audits`, the version CI pins) — no
findings, 2 ignored and 5 suppressed, confirming the existing
`.github/zizmor.yml` exceptions still cover the file.

✅ `yamlfmt` v0.16.0 `-lint` — clean.

✅ `detect_stack` exercised against live PRs in this repo:

| PR | `.stack` | Result |
| --- | --- | --- |
| #467 | stack #470, position 4/6, merged | native → skipped |
| #468 | stack #470, position 5/6, open | native → skipped |
| #404 | stack #472 | native → skipped |
| #457 | stack #475, size 1 | native → skipped |
| #443 | `null` | standalone → rebased |
| #460 | `null` | standalone → rebased |
| #999999 | HTTP 404 | warns, treated as standalone, no `set -euo
pipefail` abort |

✅ The sub-field trap verified directly: a synthetic
`{"stack":{"id":51488,"position":4,"size":6}}` with no `number` reads as
standalone under `.stack.number // empty`, and as in-a-stack under the
expression shipped here.

✅ Observed reference case — the merge of #467 (position 4 of stack
#470). GitHub retargeted #468 from
`preetam/stovepipe-buildsignal-outcome` to `main` and left #469 on
#468's branch, confirming both that GitHub handles its own members and
that a merged member retains its `stack` object.

The rebase itself can only be exercised post-merge. On the next merge of
a hand-rolled chain (the runway series is the live case) watch for `===
Stack rebase complete ===` and a child retargeted with only its own
commits; on a native-stack merge watch for each member child logging
`skipped: belongs to native stack #N`, followed by the branch sweep. The
first sweep will also reap `preetam/stovepipe-buildsignal-outcome`,
which is currently orphaned — it merged after auto-delete was turned off
and has no open dependents.
Comment on lines +614 to +619
if err := m.ensureObjects(ctx, []changeRef{ref}); err != nil {
return nil, err
}
if err := m.checkStale(ctx, []changeRef{ref}); err != nil {
return nil, err
}

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AI-generated nit: ensureObjects + checkStale re-run on every retry attempt inside promote, but the SHA doesn't change between attempts. Consider moving them before the loop (before line 608).

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Fixed — both moved above the loop.

You're right that the SHA is fixed: promote is validated to one step / one change / one URI, so the commit under promotion cannot change between attempts. Only the target tip moves, which is what the loop is actually retrying for.

Worth noting what the per-attempt cost was, since the two differ: ensureObjects after the first pass is just a local cat-file -e, but checkStale is an ls-remote — a network round trip per attempt, against a remote we retry precisely because it's busy.

While doing it I took the re-resolve out too: promote now reads rs.refs[0] instead of calling resolveChange on the URI again (see the threading change on #460).

The same hoist landed in applyTransforming on #460, so both paths now vet the request once, up front, rather than once per attempt.

## Summary

### Why?

`PROMOTE` is the last strategy in the wire contract without an apply path. It is also the one that does not fit the shared machinery: the transforming strategies build new commits locally and push `HEAD:target`, while PROMOTE advances the target to a commit that already exists, unchanged.

### What?

Adds the `promote` path, dispatched directly from `process` rather than through `applyTransforming`.

**Fast-forward only.** After resetting to the remote tip, promote classifies the named commit three ways. Already the tip, or contained in it — idempotent success, no push. A strict descendant of the tip — a genuine fast-forward, pushed as `<sha>:refs/heads/<target>`. Anything else has diverged and is a terminal `ErrConflict`; PROMOTE never creates a commit to reconcile the two.

Because it moves the ref to an existing commit, a change of any size arrives whole by construction — its ancestry comes with it, so PROMOTE needs none of the range machinery the picking strategies do.

**Exclusivity.** `resolveAndValidate` rejects a PROMOTE that is not the entire request — one step, one change, one URI — as `ErrInvalidRequest`. Two reasons, both structural: a pre-existing commit cannot descend from commits an earlier transforming step just produced, and the push targets an exact SHA rather than the locally-built HEAD, so there is nothing for a preceding step to contribute.

**Its own availability checks.** promote bypasses `tryApply`, so it performs the object-availability and staleness checks itself. Without them a commit the remote cannot supply makes every containment query fail with a plain error, which the consumer retries forever rather than reporting a request that can never succeed.

**Contention.** The same bounded retry as the transforming path, but the loop re-runs the classification rather than the apply: if the push is rejected the tip may have moved, and the commit that was a fast-forward a moment ago may now be contained (success) or divergent (conflict).

The push is a single atomic ref update, so PROMOTE needs no separate atomicity argument. A dry-run check performs the identical classification and returns without pushing, reporting no output.

With this the merger implements every strategy in the contract; `isConcreteStrategy` now admits all four.

## Test Plan

✅ `bazel test //runway/extension/merger/git:go_default_test` — passes (61s)

New cases: fast-forward promote, promote of a commit already contained in the tip, divergent promote rejected as a conflict, a multi-commit change promoted whole to the exact named commit, an unavailable commit reported as an invalid request rather than retried, both dry-run classifications, and the two composition rules (PROMOTE with a second step, PROMOTE with a second URI) rejected as invalid requests.
@behinddwalls
behinddwalls force-pushed the preetam/runway-git-merger-squash-merge branch from f5df112 to 5646e4c Compare July 30, 2026 23:38
@behinddwalls
behinddwalls force-pushed the preetam/runway-git-merger-promote branch from d060c76 to 86b485c Compare July 30, 2026 23:38
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