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Alex Gleason 5b4138046a Add merge-upstream skill for syncing with Ditto
Agora is a fork of Ditto and periodically pulls in upstream changes.
The skill documents the remote setup, fetch/merge/validate flow, and
— most importantly — Agora's deliberate divergences (no Blobbi, no
onchain wallet, Breeze Lightning only) so future conflict resolution
sides with Agora's direction instead of silently reintroducing removed
features.
2026-05-15 14:54:20 -05:00

4.3 KiB

name, description
name description
merge-upstream Merge upstream changes from the Ditto repo (which Agora is a fork of) into Agora's main branch. Load when the user asks to "merge upstream", "pull from Ditto", "sync with Ditto", or otherwise update Agora with new commits from soapbox-pub/ditto.

Merge Upstream from Ditto

Agora is a fork of Ditto. This skill walks through pulling new commits from upstream Ditto and merging them into Agora's main branch, while making philosophy-aware decisions on merge conflicts.

Philosophy: Agora vs. Ditto

Agora has diverged from Ditto on purpose in several areas. When resolving conflicts, side with Agora's direction unless the upstream change is clearly a generic bug fix or improvement that applies to both. Known divergences:

  • No Blobbi — Agora has removed Blobbi support. If an upstream change adds or modifies Blobbi-related code, prefer to drop the Blobbi parts rather than reintroduce them.
  • Lightning-only wallet — Agora uses a Breeze Lightning wallet. No onchain functionality exists in Agora, even though Ditto includes it. Reject upstream onchain wallet code; keep onchain-related conflicts resolved to Agora's Lightning-only path.
  • General rule — if upstream reintroduces a feature Agora deliberately removed, the deliberate removal wins. When in doubt, ask the user before resolving a conflict that touches a known divergence.

Spend a moment scanning the conflict for these themes before mechanically resolving line-by-line.

Procedure

Step 1: Ensure the ditto remote exists

Check the current remotes:

git remote -v

If ditto is not listed (pointing to https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/ditto.git or the equivalent git@gitlab.com:soapbox-pub/ditto.git), add it:

git remote add ditto https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/ditto.git

If a ditto remote exists but points elsewhere, fix it with git remote set-url ditto <url>.

Step 2: Confirm a clean working tree on main

git status
git branch --show-current

The working tree must be clean and the current branch must be main. If not, stop and ask the user how to proceed — do not stash or switch branches automatically.

Step 3: Fetch from Ditto

git fetch ditto

Step 4: Preview what's incoming

Show the user (or at least review yourself) the commits that will be merged before merging:

git log --oneline main..ditto/main

If the list is empty, Agora is already up to date — stop here and tell the user.

Step 5: Merge ditto/main into main

git merge ditto/main

If the merge succeeds without conflicts, proceed to Step 7.

Step 6: Resolve conflicts (if any)

For each conflicted file:

  1. Re-read the Philosophy section above.
  2. Inspect the conflict with git diff and decide based on Agora's direction, not just textual merge.
  3. For Blobbi-related conflicts, drop the Blobbi side.
  4. For onchain-wallet conflicts, keep Agora's Lightning-only path.
  5. For ambiguous cases that touch a known divergence, ask the user before resolving.
  6. After resolving each file, git add <file>.

When all conflicts are resolved, complete the merge:

git commit

Git will pre-populate a merge commit message listing the conflicted files. Keep that information and add a short note about how non-trivial conflicts were resolved (especially anything touching the divergences above), so the resolution rationale is preserved in history.

Step 7: Validate the merge

Run the full test script to confirm the merged tree still type-checks, lints, tests, and builds:

npm run test

If anything fails, fix it before declaring the merge done. Failures after an upstream merge are common — a removed Blobbi reference may now be re-imported by new upstream code, or onchain wallet types may leak into Lightning-only code paths. Fix forward in new commits on top of the merge commit; do not amend the merge commit itself.

Step 8: Report back

Tell the user:

  • How many commits were merged (git rev-list --count main@{1}..main).
  • Which files had conflicts and how each was resolved.
  • Whether npm run test passed.
  • That the merge is not pushed — the user decides when to push.

Do not push to origin automatically. The user will push when they're ready.