keeping ecmascript-modules up to date

[devsnek]

our repo needs to be kept up to date with nodejs/node. currently this happens by me rebasing roughly once per day and manually sorting out all the conflicts so we keep our changes. @jdalton has expressed discomfort that this process isn't properly documented.

what should we do moving forward?

[weswigham]

If the worry is the process/publicity of the event, we could set up a bot the opens/updates a merge PR regularly (constantly?), then the merge can be resolved publicly on GitHub and pulled in when desirable (still daily?). It'd provide a well-known public audit log of updates performed.

[devsnek]

I don't think it can be a PR, as the changes in question are amendments to existing commits, not new commits. GitHub PRs would just say that's a conflict right?

[targos]

It's definitely possible to open a merge PR. Here's an example: nodejs/ecmascript-modules#10

[devsnek]

@targos but wouldn't conflicts with our branch have to be resolved as changes to the commits from upstream, not our commits?

[targos]

I guess they would have to be resolved as part of the merge commits?
Maybe we can ask the people involved in HTTP/2 development how they managed updates to their fork?

[weswigham]

I don't think it can be a PR, as the changes in question are amendments to existing commits, not new commits. GitHub PRs would just say that's a conflict right?

You can resolve (some) merge conflicts in the github webui now.

[ljharb]

Merge commits will make later attempts to land things in node core more difficult; imo the fork should stay consistently rebased on top of core, not littered with merge commits into it.

[targos]

We have setup a daily CI job that automatically updates the master and modules-lkgr branches: https://ci.nodejs.org/view/All/job/node-update-ecmascript-modules/

In case of failure, it can send an email to a list of individuals. I put @MylesBorins and my address. Anyone else would like to be notified?