bump-ark

Opens a PR against posit-dev/positron that bumps the Ark submodule (extensions/positron-r/ark) to a target commit. Everything goes through the GitHub API via gh, so no local clone or working tree is read or touched, and it never force-pushes.

Usage

/bump-ark <pr-number | main> [@:tag ...] [--confirm] [--dry-run]

• <pr-number> tracks one Ark PR across its whole life on a single branch bump-ark/pr-<N>. While the PR is open the bump points at its head commit, so you can run Positron e2e against the dev branch. Once the Ark PR is merged, re-running /bump-ark <N> finalizes the same Positron PR to the merge commit on Ark main, turning the testing PR into the mergeable bump. Title: Bump Ark to posit-dev/ark#<N>.
• main bumps to the latest posit-dev/ark@main on a single branch bump-ark/main, advancing it in place on re-run. Title: Bump Ark to latest main.
• @:tag arguments are Positron e2e test tags. @:ark is always included; the supplied tags are added and deduped.
• --confirm advances the open main bump even when a colleague owns it (see below). Never pass it proactively.
• --dry-run prints the assembled PR body to stdout and exits, touching no branch, ref, or PR. Only read-only gh calls run. Use it to preview the Closes/tags/release-notes/commits body for a target before deciding to open or update anything, e.g. if the user wants to see it first.

The merge-commit finalize works for squash, merge-commit, and rebase merges alike, since GitHub records merge_commit_sha for all three.

When the bumped PRs close Positron issues, the body opens with Closes #<N> lines. Then the tag line, a ### Release Notes section aggregated from the bumped Ark PRs, and a ### Commits first-parent list of the Ark commits between the current submodule pointer and the target.

Release notes are scraped from each bumped Ark PR's #### New Features / #### Bug Fixes bullets. parse_description.py is a vendored copy of posit-dev/positron-release-notes's parser, so extraction matches the release-notes collector; bump_notes.py is the skill-local glue on top of it (section rendering, Closes collection).

How to run

Run the bundled script, forwarding the arguments verbatim. It needs python3 and an authenticated gh:

python3 .claude/skills/bump-ark/bump_ark.py <args>

Re-running is always safe. Both bump kinds track one fixed branch and advance it by stacking a fast-forward commit onto its current tip (so the ref only ever moves forward, never a force-push), then refresh the title and description from scratch (commit list, release notes, Closes lines).

A PR bump has no author check: its content is fully determined by the Ark PR, so collaborators converge on the same PR rather than clobber each other. A main bump is author-guarded: you can freely advance your own open Bump Ark to latest main PR, but if the open one belongs to a colleague the script refuses (it never touches their branch) and exits 3.

When the script exits reporting that the main bump belongs to someone else, do not re-run with --confirm on your own initiative. Relay who owns it and its URL, and ask the user to confirm, for example: "The 'Bump Ark to latest main' PR belongs to @foo (). Advance it anyway?" Only if they explicitly confirm, re-run the same command with --confirm appended.

The script prints the Positron PR URL to stdout (progress goes to stderr). Relay that URL. If it reports that the submodule is already at the target, relay that as-is instead.

With --dry-run, stdout is the PR body instead of a URL, and nothing is created or modified: not the tracked branch, not its ref, not the PR. Use it only when asked to preview a bump; the default /bump-ark <args> invocation should not pass it.