Unclear error message when trying to merge a commit from a user without the ECA

Summary

When a user hasn't signed the Contributor Agreement, their commits can be pushed, CI passes usually (at least in Oniro). It fails at merge with 'An error occurred while merging. Try again.'

Steps to reproduce

Create an user as guest, do not sign the ECA. Create a fork, add a commit, have it approved by commuters. Try to merge.

What is the current bug behavior?

'An error occurred while merging. Try again.'

What is the expected correct behavior?

A message like 'The user has not signed the Contributor Agreement. Merge failed.'

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

We had that in eclipse/oniro-core/oniro!335 (merged) and eclipse/oniro-core/oniro!263 (closed)

Impact

Frustrating for new developers

mentioned in merge request eclipse/oniro-core/oniro!335 (merged)

added team:webdev label

Create an user as guest, do not sign the ECA. Create a fork, add a commit, have it approved by commuters. Try to merge.

Can you elaborate on that? Users shouldn't be created as guests. All users should be users who created an Eclipse account as they need to accept our terms of use.

I meant Guest/Reporter at the Gitlab level. The Eclipse account is a typical one, accepting ToS, but NOT accepting ECA in this case (the user didn't know they need to do it).

assigned to @malowe

@malowe Can you take a look at this when you get back in two weeks?

I was under the impression this issue was fixed via: #1017 (closed)

I am not convinced the error is from the ECA but it's a possibility. Our ECA git hook does not return an error with the text 'An error occurred while merging. Try again.'

https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/it/api/git-eca-rest-api/-/blob/master/src/main/rb/eca.rb

However, it is possible that Gitlab does not print the error from our git hook in the UI. Only when using the git CLI.

Let's wait for @malowe to investigate this further.

Not sure if they're all related but there are a few other similar issues that were created by @mrybczyn.

• #2094 (closed)
• #2081 (closed)

@mrybczyn I took a look at the repository settings for eclipse/oniro-core/oniro and saw that the following setting was enabled:

Check whether the commit author is a GitLab user Restrict commits to existing GitLab users.

This is known to trow the error that you see. I've disabled it. Can you try now to see if you can merge?

Thanks for looking into the issue. I took my freedom to try it with #2081 (closed) Launched the merge train, and we should know in ~1h

Thanks for starting another merge train.

Just to set expectations, @malowe is back from vacation next week. If this does not work, I will have someone to investigate this further by mid-next week.

I think we can close this now with the GL 15 upgrade. We were in a deadzone where Gitlab UI Error messaging was broken outside of our ability to fix (issue in Gitaly probably). With the v15 upgrade, we now give a link to our status page for the latest commit list.

Are we good to go for this?

I think we are good now! Glad to see that our Gitlab upgrade has improved our ability to provide more feedback on failed ECA!

closed

mentioned in issue #4981 (closed)