decide_state() derived state from three inputs -- draft flag, requested
reviewers, submitted reviews -- and read NOTHING about mergeability or checks.
Combined with the `if requested "$HUMAN"` short-circuit at the top of its
precedence, the label was sticky: once the maintainer was requested, the PR
read state:needs-human through conflicts, through red CI, through a
force-push that staled every approval. Nothing demoted it.
Observed twice in one afternoon, in two different shapes. Three PRs sat at
state:needs-human while CONFLICTING for hours -- the board inviting a merge
GitHub had already disabled. And #119, after a rebase, read MERGEABLE, four
green checks, state:needs-human, with ZERO reviews bound to its head: every
visible signal saying "merge me" over a tree no reviewer had seen. That second
shape is the dangerous one, because unlike a conflict nothing on the page
contradicts it.
The rule the label now keeps: state:needs-human means a human could merge this
RIGHT NOW, so anything making that false outranks the request that put it
there.
CONFLICTING or failing checks -> state:needs-rebase (new; the agent's to fix)
approvals staled by a push -> state:addressing (nobody reviewed this tree)
An UNFINISHED round still yields to an explicit human request -- a maintainer
pulling a PR to themselves early is deliberate, and MISSING (nobody has
reviewed yet) is a different fact from STALE (everyone reviewed something
else). That distinction is why the two are handled in different arms rather
than collapsed.
UNKNOWN mergeability is deliberately NOT treated as unmergeable: GitHub
reports it for about a minute after every merge while it recomputes, and
flapping every open PR through needs-rebase on each merge would be worse than
the bug being fixed. A failed read of either fact degrades to the same "do not
know" value, for the same reason -- an API hiccup must not relabel the board.
Also adds merge-next, because a correct needs-human still does not say WHICH
PR to merge first, and order matters when they conflict through CHANGELOG.md.
Queue order is intent, so the reconciler never sets it; it only CLEARS it the
moment the PR stops being mergeable-by-a-human -- precisely the staleness that
made needs-human untrustworthy.
Both live shapes are pinned in test/labels-reconcile.sh (19 -> 29 fixtures),
including that UNKNOWN does not trigger needs-rebase and that a draft outranks
a conflict. Proven non-vacuous: dropping the mergeability arm fails 4
assertions, dropping the STALE precedence fails 2, restoring returns 29/0.
Closes#136
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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