Reopen an accidentally merged PR

[lrozenblyum]

Let's have a scenario when a large PR (200+ files) to an unprotected branch is being reviewed by multiple reviewers.

One of them accidentally merges it while there exist still open conversations and other reviewers haven't finished the review.

In this case it would be really great to have a possibility to reopen such pull request.

What is possible now:

• restore the merged branch if it was auto-deleted
• reset HEAD of the target branch to the commit before the merge commit.

However what is not possible now (tried various solutions from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12674304/github-reopening-a-merged-pull-request were not working):

reopen the PR itself, instead we need to create a new 1.

Why is it a problem:

• 'Viewed' status of files in the PR is lost - reviewers who actively using these checkboxes to track their review progress need to start from scratch.
• The conversations exist in the closed PR - and need to be checked separately, they're not connected to the newly created PR.

So please consider a possibility to reopen a PR.

[klaudiusmiskinis]

But you are able to revert the changes, after reverting now you can go to the branch and from the last commit create a new branch or just stay in the same branch and work on it and create a new Pull Request with the exact same moment it was before accepting the merge.

[lrozenblyum]

@klaudiusmiskinis yes it's possible, but as I mentioned above in this case we lose the reviewers 'Viewed' files progress and conversations are inconvenient to reach.

[ossanna16]

Hi there @hwansday and welcome to our community! Thank you for your suggestion 🙂

[technillogue]

also interested in this, it would be great to keep conversation history

[MaskRay]

Thanks for creating this feature request.

The description is about "accidentally merges" but the supporting arguments well apply to other PRs that are identified as faulty and therefore reverted.

[ocornut]

Additionally GitHub has a bug with branch rename which can erroneously close some pull requests (which I have reported as ticket 2006174 and was acknowledged, posted a recap at ocornut/imgui#6141 (comment)). Presently I calculated that renaming my "master" branch to "main" would erroneously close about 10 PR which I won't be able to reopen. I track open PR and it is unacceptable to me to lose that information.

If I could reopen a closed PR I would be able to rename my branch.

[ilchenkoArtem]

Any update?

[kurtbahartr]

Apparently no updates and a friend of mine got struck with an accidental merge too. She accidentally pushed the dev branch to main and that eventually marked the relevant PR where we could track the entire to-do for dev branch as merged. I already reverted the push mistake and deleted the release+tag caused by that mistake, but reopening the PR is a must too...

[kurellajunior]

Also from our side, this happens more often than it should. Reopening a PR should simply be possible, if the branch still exists and is not merged. For sanity we often have to roll back, which indeed means to set back the main branch and restore the feature branch. Then adding something to the feature branch and redo the PR. In most cases it is sufficient to have a new PR with the old one being plain wrong (not merged anymor) in the history causing only mild confusion.
But sometimes it is important to continue on the PR where it was merged. Can you please consider reopening a PR if the branch exists and its HEAD does not have a merge successor?