paul-mclendahand 3.2.1

Tool for combining GitHub pull requests.

Tool for combining GitHub pull requests.

Code:

https://github.com/willkg/paul-mclendahand

Issues:

https://github.com/willkg/paul-mclendahand/issues

License:

MPL v2

Documentation:

this README

Status

2024-12-19: No longer maintained.

Install

(Recommended) With uv:

uv tool install paul-mclendahand

With pip from PyPI:

pip install paul-mclendahand

Quick start

Configure pmac

pmac needs to know the GitHub user and GitHub project.

You can set configuration in the pyproject.toml file:

[tool.paul-mclendahand]
github_user = "user"
github_project = "project"
main_branch = "git-main-branch-name"

Or you can set configuration in the setup.cfg file:

[tool:paul-mclendahand]
github_user=user
github_project=project
main_branch=git-main-branch-name

You can override the configuration variables with environment variables:

PMAC_GITHUB_USER=user
PMAC_GITHUB_PROJECT=project
PMAC_MAIN_BRANCH=git-main-branch-name

Optional

You can also use a GitHub personal access token. You set it in the PMAC_GITHUB_API_TOKEN environment variable.

For example:

PMAC_GITHUB_API_TOKEN=abcdef0000000000000000000000000000000000 pmac listprs

Note

If you find pmac stops working because it’s getting rate-limited by GitHub, you should use a personal access token.

Configure git

When cherry-picking commits, pmac sometimes causes Git to push you to resolve the same issue multiple times. For this reason, we encourage you to set rerere.enabled to true.

Globally:

$ git config --global rerere.enabled true

Local to the git repository you’re in:

$ git config rerere.enabled true

git will keep track of resolutions and re-apply them.

Using pmac

After you’ve configured git, then you can use pmac like this:

1. Create a new branch:

   git checkout <MAIN-BRANCH>
   git checkout -b update-prs

2. List open PRs:

   pmac listprs

3. Combine some pull requests into it:

   pmac add 5100 5101 5102

   Use the same pull requests numbers as on GitHub.

   Internally, pmac uses git am to apply commits from pull requests. If you hit a git am conflict, pmac will tell you. You can edit the file in another terminal to manually resolve the conflict. Then do:

   git add FILE
   git commit
   git am --continue

   After that, you can continue with pmac.

4. When you’re done, push the branch to GitHub and create a pull request.

   pmac can help with the PR description:

   pmac prmsg

pmac

Usage: pmac [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  GitHub pull request combiner tool.

  pmac uses a "[tool:paul-mclendahand]" section in setup.cfg to set
  configuration variables. You can override these using PMAC_VARNAME environment
  variables.

  Additionally, if you want to use a GitHub personal access token, you need to
  provide the "PMAC_GITHUB_API_TOKEN" variable in the environment set to the
  token.

  For issues, see: https://github.com/willkg/paul-mclendahand/issues

Options:
  --version  Show the version and exit.
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  add      Combine specified PRs into this branch.
  listprs  List available PRs for the project.
  prmsg    Print out summary of commits suitable for a PR msg.

pmac listprs

Usage: pmac listprs [OPTIONS]

  List available PRs for the project.

Options:
  --labels / --no-labels  List labels
  --format [table|tab]
  --help                  Show this message and exit.

pmac add

Usage: pmac add [OPTIONS] PR...

  Combine specified PRs into this branch.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

pmac prmsg

Usage: pmac prmsg [OPTIONS]

  Print out summary of commits suitable for a PR msg.

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Why does this project exist?

Two main reasons.

First, GitHub doesn’t support combining pull requests. There is a forum post about it here: https://github.community/t/feature-request-combine-pull-requests/2250

Second, dependabot (also owned by GitHub) doesn’t support grouping dependency updates into a single pull request. If you have 50 dependency updates, it creates 50 pull requests (sometimes more!). I have a lot of projects and lack of grouping updates makes monthly maintenance miserable. There’s an issue for this: https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/issues/1190