[default branch protection] Backfill existing settings to new jsonb column
Background Context
Currently, the options for default branch protection at the instance and group level lag behind, and are not as fin grained, as the options available from the Protected Branches feature
The branch defaults lag behind because the current implementation uses an integer column to store the default settings, which becomes difficult if not impossible to expand as new options and finer detail controls are added to the protected branches feature
at a high-ish level the existing feature is implemented as:
- there are integer columns on the database tables (application level and group level)
- these integers are mapped to a subset of protected branch settings
- these mappings defined in access.rb
- mappings are used here via
BranchProtection
helper
- when creating a default branch, those settings are passed into the protected branch service
Proposal
A more detailed proposal can be seen in the epic [here](&10391
At a high level the proposal is to:
- use a
jsonb
column rather than an integer - update the settings API to accept a payload the matches the protected branches API
- Pass those settings into the
ProtecteBrancheService
here
This issue
This issue is specifically for tracking the progress of backfilling the new column.
- iterate over all existing
default_branch_protection
values at the instance and group level - map their current value to a json payload matching the protected branches API
- save generated mapping to new column
It is possible we can defer doing a backfill for awhile, instead adding some logic so that at read time we say "if the new jsonb
column is null
, fall back to the original default_branch_protection
logic"
We will need to do a backfill eventually if the goal is to deprecate the original column and eventually remove it. However, deferring until the API is updated may save us from a scenario where we
- backfill a json payload with structure A
- update API to accept a json payload with structure B
- need to do a second backfill to correct the original backfill from A to B