a8n: Finish implementation of `src actions exec`

[mrnugget]

I want to finish sourcegraph/src-cli#80, check off the TODOs mentioned in the PR and possibly adding improvements.

[mrnugget]

I'm upping my estimation on this, because I think it would be helpful if we implement the src campaigns create -interactive command that's suggested by the CLI right now. What do you think @sqs?

(cc @tsenart)

[sqs]

Sounds good. In case it wasn't clear, that -interactive flag means the command would show a diff (probably in a pager like less) and then ask the user for the title, description, and branch name in terminal UI form fields, and confirmation before creating it. So similar to the web UI now. To simplify it, it is fine to require the title/description/branch to be passed as CLI flags and just show the diff and ask the user for confirmation.

If you had a different idea in mind, that is probably totally fine, I just wanted to lay out what I was thinking.

[mrnugget]

command would show a diff (probably in a pager like less) and then ask the user for the title, description, and branch name in terminal UI form fields, and confirmation before creating it. So similar to the web UI now. To simplify it, it is fine to require the title/description/branch to be passed as CLI flags and just show the diff and ask the user for confirmation.

Sounds good to me! But just to be clear: with "terminal UI form fields" you mean single-line prompts, right? Or did you have an ncurses interface in mind?

---

Another idea I had that I wanted to run by you: instead of having scopeQuery in the actions.json I think it would be great to only have the run ("steps") in the JSON and specify the scopeQuery as a flag:

src actions exec -reposQuery 'repo:github.com/sourcegraph repohasfile:README.md' -only-repos

We could then add an -only-repos flag so users could preview the list of repos we found and tweak the -reposQuery query before running the plan.

In the future we could then add src repos search 'query here' and then do something like this:

src actions exec -repos $(src repos search 'query here' | jq '. | join(", ")) ' -f action.json

[sqs]

@mrnugget I had ncurses in mind, but thinking more, it should probably open $EDITOR. The first line is the campaign title, the rest is the description, except for the line beginning with Branch: or # Branch: which is the branch name. The description will be multi-line, so single-line prompts would not work, and an ncurses editor would be annoying.

[sqs]

@mrnugget Re: moving scopeQuery out of the action file, that helps in some cases but hurts in others. In general, similar tools have the concept of a "test" to determine whether or not the script to change files should run. For shepherd this is should_migrate. For us this is scopeQuery. In both cases it feels like a part of the campaign rather than a flag (which is only saved in shell history). While you are iterating, I understand it is nice to have a flag for this, though.

Adding -only-repos does sound like it would complicate/overload the command too much. Also it feels ugly to have one CLI flag -only-repos (kebab case) and another -reposQuery (lower camel case).

Also, regarding scopeQuery vs reposQuery: for large monorepos I think we will want this to match trees not just repos in the future. So I would recommend calling it scope query. If you decide to call it repos query, you should spell out the full word repositoriesQuery for consistency (almost all places in our API use that instead of repo/repos).

What about keeping the scopeQuery in the action file but having another subcommand devoted to helping you iterate on the right scope query? Like src actions scope-query that could read in the action file and show you the repos matched, or accept CLI flag input for an arbitrary query and show you the same. Then if you run src -v actions exec (verbose) it would print out a message like # Matched 17 repositories. Use 'src actions scope-query' for help with scoping..

[mrnugget]

Also, regarding scopeQuery vs reposQuery: for large monorepos I think we will want this to match trees not just repos in the future. So I would recommend calling it scope query. If you decide to call it repos query, you should spell out the full word repositoriesQuery for consistency (almost all places in our API use that instead of repo/repos).

Good point. At the moment, though, I have a feeling that users sometimes expect scopeQuery to work like an exact search whose results are fed into the Automation campaign. The majority of that is, IMHO, a UI problem (it should make clearer what the scopeQuery is and what it's not), but I also suspect that the name doesn't help.

What about keeping the scopeQuery in the action file but having another subcommand devoted to helping you iterate on the right scope query? Like src actions scope-query that could read in the action file and show you the repos matched, or accept CLI flag input for an arbitrary query and show you the same. Then if you run src -v actions exec (verbose) it would print out a message like # Matched 17 repositories. Use 'src actions scope-query' for help with scoping..

Sounds good!