Ported from heavy-duty/box#137 (heavy-duty/box#136) so the three repos'
reconcilers stay byte-identical. The state machine here was byte-identical to
box's before this change, and remains so after -- only the scope:* taxonomy
differs, correctly.
decide_state() derived state from three inputs -- draft flag, requested
reviewers, submitted reviews -- and read NOTHING about mergeability or checks.
With the `if requested "$HUMAN"` short-circuit at the top of its precedence,
the label was sticky: once the maintainer was requested, a PR read
state:needs-human through conflicts, through red CI, through a force-push that
staled every approval.
This repo paid for it directly. During the ten-PR batch merged today, every
merge re-conflicted the PRs below it through CHANGELOG.md, and each kept its
state:needs-human label throughout -- inviting merges that could not happen.
It was caught only by opening them one at a time, which is the work the label
exists to save.
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 -- MISSING
(nobody has reviewed yet) is a different fact from STALE (everyone reviewed
something else). UNKNOWN mergeability is NOT treated as unmergeable: GitHub
reports it for about a minute after every merge, and flapping every open PR
through needs-rebase on each merge would be worse than the bug. A failed read
degrades to the same "do not know" value.
Also adds merge-next: queue order is intent, so the reconciler never sets it,
only CLEARS it once the PR stops being mergeable-by-a-human.
Fixtures 19 -> 29, including that UNKNOWN does not trigger needs-rebase and a
draft outranks a conflict. No live dry-run evidence here -- this repo has no
open PRs right now -- so the fixtures and box's live dry-run are the proof.
Closes#87
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>