Merge Requests last updated is always renewed when someone views a MR

Currently MRs are updated every time a user views a MR.
This renders the "sort by recently updated" filter useless. Even MRs which haven't been updated for months, can end up being shown as "last updated 20 minutes ago".

This is probably caused by the check against the target branch to display if a MR is still mergable.
Why do we store the result in the DB btw?
We renew it every time a user visits the page and something has changed in the source/target branch.
Maybe it would be an option to store it in Rails cache to avoid updating the MR.

to fix this, /cc @dzaporozhets

I agree it annoying.

Maybe it would be an option to store it in Rails cache to avoid updating the MR

Its like use a sledge-hammer to crack a nut . Maybe we can change merge_status in db without touching updated_at field

what do you have against the sledgehammer? It's an almighty tool that always works

But yeah, your suggestion sounds easier.

You can set merge_request.record_timestamps = false before saving to have it do exactly what the setting name implies :)

Who will make an MR?

Might be hard to fix because of state machine.

Milestone changed to 7.10

I looked more into this. A MR gets updated when a user visits it ONLY if the merge_status status was invalidated (i.e. moved to the unchecked state). This occurs whenever a new commit is pushed that may affect the MR, which also changes the updated_at field. In other words, a MR doesn't always get updated when a user visits it, but it may look this way on GitLab.com because most of the time there has been a change to the master branch.

It's easy enough to set record_timestamps = false to prevent automerge_check from changing the updated_at field, and this looks like it fixes the issue described in this issue. However, as I mentioned earlier, the updated_at field will still be modified whenever master is updated, which may also make the "sort by recently updated" function less useful.

Thoughts?

See !431 (merged).

Fixed in 88a15b4e!

Status changed to closed