I have been using Magit and Forge for several years, mainly with projects on self-hosted Gitlab instances. The experience has been great!

One of the nice things that Forge did for me was showing the numbers of merge requests (in !123 form) in my magit-log views. Some time ago, however, this stopped working. Actually, this stopped working quite some time ago, maybe a year or more. I was too lazy to report it and too busy to investigate. IIRC it didn’t stop working right away for all repos, so I guess it is not related to e.g. upgrading to Emacs 28 (and it was definitely before I upgraded to Emacs 29.1).

To investigate this in more detail, I created new clones of several projects, but that didn’t change anything. I also tried a simplified Emacs config in a new home directory to make sure that Forge’s database was created from scratch. Same problem persists.

On Forge’s Github pages, I found some references to interactions of Forge with bug-reference-mode, so maybe it somehow has to do with that? On the other hand, given that I used a fresh Emacs config + new clones, I guess this isn’t the cause of the issue either.

Does anyone know how to get the MR numbers back in Magit’s log view?

  • magthe0BEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    IIRC this was actually accomplished using a configuration in the git repo itself. GitHup PR numbers are custom refs, but they aren’t included by default on git clone. I don’t remember what the refs are called though. Hopefully someone else can help with that.

    • tarsius_BEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Exactly.

      When you add the current repository to the forge database, then that also takes care of adding the appropriate fetch refspecs.

      When you remove and then clone again a git repository, which was already being tracked in the forge database, then you don’t have to add the repository to the forge database again. But that means that the step where the fetch refspecs are added, also won’t be run again.

      But you can use M-x forge-add-pullreq-refspec to add them explicitly. Also see the option by the same name.

      • ph0t0nixOPBEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Thanks u/magthe0 and u/tarsius_, that rang a bell. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the problem. The refspecs have been added to the .git/config files of the clones (I usually keep my working copies around and rarely clone from scratch).

        As a test, I just (freshly) cloned one of my projects in a subdirectory /tmp and indeed, after running M-x forge-add-pullreq-refspec, the following was added to the .git/config file:

               fetch = +refs/merge-requests/*/head:refs/pullreqs/*

        for remote origin. This looks fine (and such a line is present in the ‘regular’ clones of my projects as well). Next, I ran M-x magit-fetch-all, as well as N f f to tell Forge to fetch all topics. The Magit status window shows the “Pull requests” and “Issues” sections and both are populated (with proper !123 type coding for the merge requests). However, when I open the magit log screen I am back where I was before: I don’t see the MR numbers as refspecs there (I have the -d Show refnames (--decorate) option turned on.

        Side note: I’m not a master of the Git plumbing commands, but git show-ref doesn’t seem to list all MRs. For this test project I have 10 MRs (all merged or closed), but only 9 and 10 show up:

        $ git show-ref      
f0aa1b61be5ea74c47c473a716f209c698a1a006 refs/heads/master
68e5d70e05fbdc6d47e8cb6da903dcd89d4432ea refs/pullreqs/10
886d7067aa3e609e1b11560a949182dadc57401b refs/pullreqs/9
f0aa1b61be5ea74c47c473a716f209c698a1a006 refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
f0aa1b61be5ea74c47c473a716f209c698a1a006 refs/remotes/origin/master

        However, in the Magit status view, I do see the last 5 and M-x forge-list-pullreqs lists them all.

          • ph0t0nixOPBEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Thanks a lot for digging that up, u/tarsius_! In the example repo I mentioned above, I now see MRs !9 and !10 in the Magit log view (well, without the !, but that is fine).

            The fact that I don’t see older MRs probably has something to do with the corresponding refs not having been downloaded. I’ll see if I can figure out how to do that.