hub pull-request should show organization-wide template

[nikolaik]

Command attempted: Ran hub pull-request to create a new PR in a repository belonging to a specific organization.

What happened: Did not fetch the organization-wide PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md from repo named .github repo and use as pull request description. Instead used a blank description.

More info: Steps to reproduce:

• Create an organization with a repository named .github
• Add a file PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md with some content
• In another repository in the same organization as you created the .github repo, checkout a new branch, change some stuff, make a commit and push the branch to github.
• run hub pull-request

[mislav]

Thank you for reporting this! We do not yet have support for per-organization issue nor pull request templates. I'm going to re-label this as "feature", but I can also see how you can perceive it as a bug.

[nikolaik]

Thanks for replying so quickly. I am considering trying to do a PR on this, how would you start?

[mislav]

Here is where the pull-request command reads repo templates from disk: https://github.com/github/hub/blob/ec93940647a88a6389cf3afbd4d8e6c5601fe9a6/commands/pull_request.go#L302-L305

You would need to add a condition that, in case a template isn't found in this repo, fetches the templates from the ORG/.github repo. The precise way of doing that would be up to you to figure out. To my knowledge, there isn't a GitHub API to read repo templates.

I have doubts about this functionality. Fetching per-org repo templates will add an additional overhead for every repo that doesn't have its own templates, slowing down the time since pull-request was run to when a text editor opens for authoring PR title & message. Also it looks like it will add complexity to the code and long-term maintenance overhead, and I'm not sure how useful the feature will be in the first place.

You may take a stab implementing this, but keep in mind all these considerations and that the feature won't necessarily make it into a release considering the trade-offs.

[alop]

Would be nice if this could be a configuration option or maybe something we can set via an environment variable.