Our Frontend Was Guessing What Our Parser Accepts. It Was Wrong for 70 of 75 Attributes.

In a detailed examination of Mergify's frontend and engine parser, it was discovered that the frontend was incorrectly guessing which operators were valid for various attributes, with 70 out of 75 attributes offering wrong menus. This misalignment led to both over-offering and under-offering of operators, resulting in either validation errors or silent failures where users simply assumed certain functionalities were not available. Instead of patching the heuristic, Mergify chose to have the engine's parser publish its own grammar through the configuration schema, making the frontend import this generated schema directly. This change eliminated the frontend's need to maintain its own version of the parser's logic, ensuring consistency between the engine and the frontend, and allowing the documentation to update automatically. This approach not only removed the potential for future discrepancies but also streamlined the maintenance process, with the schema serving as the single source of truth for operator validity, improving the user experience by accurately reflecting the engine's capabilities.

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