sandboxes: soft delete on merge

[josephjclark]

Right now, when a sandbox is deleted, it is dropped instantly from the database.

I've had whiffs of pushback about this from services.

One thing that happen is you can merge a sandbox, only merging Workflows A and B. But after the merge you realise you also wanted to include workflow C!

Or maybe you merged the sandbox to main, but you want to double check the changes (perhaps a bug crept in on main and you want to track what's going on).

Or maybe it was just deleted in error and someone is freaking out.

Two features that might help this are:

• Flag sandboxes as deleted and leave them for N days before fully dropping them (just like we do with credentials)
• Allow a delete to be cancelled or undone

[josephjclark]

This does sort of enable long running sandboxes by stealth #4466

[josephjclark]

@elias-ba be great if you could take a look at this! We might want to chat about precise scoping

[elias-ba]

@josephjclark thinking about this, why do we necessarily need to delete after merge ? Can't we make it options ? Something like Merge and Merge And Delete. Or merge and then make delete another independent action ?

[josephjclark]

We delete after merge to discourage long-running sandboxes

There are a few considerations on long running sandboxes that we haven't really thought through yet and we anticipate that users will get into trouble

Even if we supported long running sandboxes today, this would still be useful. Consider:

• User clicks to merge a workflow
• There is a checkbox called "delete sandbox after merging" (which is the behaviour we have no, but users can disable it)
• If users DO want to delete the sandbox (just like deleting a branch in git after merging), it should be soft-deleted