post-comment with ID

[zimbatm]

https://twitter.com/timbertson/status/1245081280657514496?s=20

Cool! I'd love a variant which did add-or-update comment, so it doesn't add a new comment on every push to a long PR. Maybe using a cache key to store existing comment ID?

---

I don't see many locations aside from the comment itself to store the cache key. Maybe something like this?

action-cli post-comment --comment-id "my-id" "message"

<!-- my-id -->
message

[Rizary]

Maybe we can edit comment that already being posted? Like every time someone push into the existing PR, the comment will not be added twice but instead revise current comment.

[zimbatm]

yes that's the idea

[timbertson]

I was thinking you'd post a comment, then store the comment ID (as in, the github generated ID) with however actions/cache stores stuff. But the predetermined ID in a comment is much nicer, because failures don't affect it.

[zimbatm]

One thing to verify is if the default GITHUB_TOKEN has the permissions to read and update the comments

[DrSensor]

Or maybe store the id as git-notes 🤔

References:

• Gerrit refs/notes/review
• Git Tip of the Week: Git Notes
• more uses for git notes, and hidden treasures in Gerrit
• Git Dark Magic (just my old notes about git-notes)
• my attempt storing perf data on GitHub as git-notes

[zimbatm]

Are they being displayed in the PR view? The main motivation was to allow posting formatting and linting issues on PRs.

[DrSensor]

No. It's hidden in the git ref object and can only be accessed via specific urls or explicitly fetch them via git fetch $remote refs/notes/$name:refs/notes/$name.

git clone will not automatically fetch the notes. So the .git folder will stay as it was (unless you fetch them) and the git history will stay clean (whatever you fetch them or not).

Currently, no GitHub UI or button to easily access it, just url.