Can it actually be detected by a bot? I only know you can do it through a git pre-push hook, but not even a husky hook.

Heh good question. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69882152/is-it-possible-to-check-a-git-push-force-in-a-github-action has a giant essay of info I'm tl;dr-ing, followed by maybe useful tips. Not super sold on that leading to a solution, but you never know.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/17503259/1830407 mentions there's a webhook capable event that includes a forced key. I found an example here: https://docs.github.com/en/developers/webhooks-and-events/webhooks/webhook-events-and-payloads#webhook-payload-example-37

It would be nice for a clean+simple bot that we could open source for other repos to use ideally. But a webhook setup wouldn't be too much more work.

Also, there's also a bit of a nuance here: for example, if a maintainer reviewed commit C1, and then I pushed C2 which I'm sure no-one has reviewed yet, I think it's fine for me to force-push the branch tip without re-writing C1. I do that quite often to correct silly typos in my last few commits.

I'd still ask not to force push in that case though 😛. A couple reasons:

• It will sometimes happen that a maintainer will check out C2 locally, such as a second review coming in after the first or when using the branch as a reference for some other work. And running gh pr checkout ... fails if history needs to be reset.
• Other people will look at the PR and think it's ok to force push.

Let us see your typos!

Eh, that's true. Hard to say which TZ the maintainer sits in these days😉

Just that the typos make me seem like a bad programmer. Lol

Me force pushing after I wrote the guide telling people not to force push

Toooooo beeeeee fair.

When I wrote that GH sucked at handing force push. It meant you had no idea about what changes were made.

However now-a-days GH shows you a button that lets you compare before and after the force push.

Idk if we really need that stipulation any more

I thought it's about incremental reviews? Does it un-collapse all viewed files when you force-push the entire branch?

There's that. I also find it annoying to review because it still messes with comments.

Edit: oh, and I think a lot of people are in the habit of doing it because other repos don't squash merges (another feature GH has put more love into the last couple of years). They assume they still need to do that extra effort in our repo. It's nice to let them know they don't.