Import changesets in a few clicks

[sourcegraph-bot]

Motivation

• Customers tell us that tracking and managing changesets with the GUI is extremely useful
• We think that this is a great, low-effort entrypoint to get users into the product and help them discover batch changes.
• In practice I see 0 imported changesets vs  ~ 600 published changesets over the 5 last weekly cohorts.
• This does not require any server side batch changes backend, so we could use it to validate the Server Side Batch Changes GUI independently of the backend.

User Problem

~Assumption~ ✅ : importing changesets has a lot of value and looks great when shown, but is hard to do in practice as it requires listing the PRs one by one in a spec file.

Use cases:

• I want to import changesets that I manually opened so as to track the progress of a change I'm making across multiple teams.
• I want top import everything dependabot opened into a Batch Change dashboard (+3)

Ideas

• ~Create imported Batch Changes by creating a spec and running it in the GUI (no Docker run needed)~
• ~A GUI view to add search, filter and pick changesets to add.~
• Even better, monitor GitHub (via org-wide webhooks) for any PRs with a label campaign:whatever/whatever and adds them to that campaign.
• the gh CLI might have some nice options that would let you do something like gh pr list -whatever | xargs gh pr update label=campaign:whatever/whatever. It does not support searching by branch name though.
• Add changesets from branches returned by a Sourcegraph search query. Eg. rev:this/branch/name. Could be useful for example to bring dependabot updates into Batch Changes, as they use standard branch names.
• Build a Sourcegraph extension. Users can use codehost filtering UI to send changests to Sourcegraph.

[sourcegraph-bot]

Link to feature: https://sourcegraph.productboard.com/feature-board/planning/features/7894956

[github-actions[bot]]

Hey, @sourcegraph/batchers (@eseliger @mrnugget @LawnGnome @malomarrec @chrispine @courier-new) - we have been mentioned. Let's take a look.

[malomarrec]

+1 from customer

import everything dependabot opened

and +1 from customer

[malomarrec]

+1 from customer

What I would ideally like to do with my batch change is track a bunch of existing PRs for a package release, the PRs automatically get created by dependabot. But the importChangesets property examples in the documentation all depend on a PR number for the externalIDs property which I won't know and would have to lookup.
Ideally I would be able to do a search by branch name to import these dependabot PRs since all the dependabot PRs use a uniform branch name. So I am able to find all those branches in a SourceGraph search with this query: repo:myorg/.* rev:dependabot/pip/ And incorporate that into my YAML file.

[malomarrec]

It sounds like all those use cases would be addressed by:

• either the idea that Adam presented: build a Sourcegraph extension, that allows users to use the codehost GUI to filter changesets, then use the extension to import them into batch changes
• either having a webhook that listens for a specific label being applied (batch-change/my-batch-change-name) and imports changesets with this label into the batch change.

Next steps:

• investigate scope of building an extension vs webhooks
• design and share a minimal mockup