Recently Updated Check

Overview

A GitHub action that checks whether a pull-request is up-to-date with the latest changes from the source repository.

Summary

GitHub Actions are configured to run tests on the HEAD commit of pull requests (e.g. not the pull request’s merge commit, which would be the result of merging the pull request into the target branch).

Therefore, if a pull request is not up-to-date with the latest changes in the source repository, there is a possibility that breaking changes could be introduced even if the CI tests are passing.

GitHub does provide a way to ensure that pull requests are entirely up-to-date before merging, but for high volume repositories like cudf, this would dramatically increase the amount of time it takes to get a pull request merged.

As a compromise, the Recently Updated check has been introduced to ensure that pull requests are “reasonably up-to-date” with the corresponding source repository.

This method doesn’t guarantee that breaking changes will not be introduced, but it does help provide some assurances that pull requests aren’t significantly out-of-date (similar to how testing merge commits work).

Additional testing confidence comes from RAPIDS’ nightly testing, which tests the HEAD commit of each development branch.

The Recently Updated check is configurable by editing the following values in the .github/ops-bot.yaml file:

# enables/disables the Recently Updated Check
recently_updated: true

# sets the threshold for how many commits behind the pull request must be to trigger a failure.
# defaults to 5 if not set
recently_updated_threshold: 5

Note that since RAPIDS uses squash commits for pull requests, the recently_updated_threshold value effectively means “how many pull requests have been merge into the source repository since the current pull request has last been updated”.