Feature to limit branch name length

[henricook]

A couple of times recently, for the first time i've noticed it, Steward has been raising branch names longer than 40 characters.

We have an internal limit on our repositories of 40 characters for infra reasons (K8S pod names get too long). We could tackle that, or I could build feature in Steward to limit branch names (some kind of substring of the full package name perhaps).

Comment request: Does this feature exist, or does it sound like a valid feature we could build for Steward?

[mzuehlke]

When you look at for what branch names are used you will see that they are used to identify already created pull request.
This means the there has to be a stable mapping between a set of updates the related branch name

[henricook]

For sure, I'm thinking something like:

Example long branch name (from the reason i'm looking at this): update/owasp-java-html-sanitizer-20240325.1 (43 chars)
Branch name limit: 40

• Take name before the version: owasp-java-html-sanitizer
• Trim num of characters + 6 (for hash and hyphen)
• owasp-java-html-sanitizer -> owasp-java-html
• Append the first 5 chars of a hash of the full original value
• owasp-java-html-76661
• Final branch name: update/owasp-java-html-76661-20240325.1 (39 chars because of hyphen deduplication)

All this said, just being able to change update/ to u/ would save plenty of characters and probably solve my issue, so maybe I'll start with an MR for that

[mzuehlke]

That sounds reasonable.