Contributing Guidelines: Ongoing Issue with 'Out-of-Date with the Base Branch'

[azarboon]

Describe the issue

I’ve been experiencing difficulty making pull requests (PRs) in the AWS CDK, and the issue isn’t addressed in the contributing guidelines. I follow the steps outlined: I fork the repository, ensure it’s synced with the latest changes, create a feature branch based on the most recent main branch in my account, and then make the PR (confirming my main branch is up-to-date throughout the process). However, apparently after any new commit to AWS CDK, my PR displays the message "This branch is out-of-date with the base branch." I’ve tried both committing and rebasing to update the branch, but the issue persists.

I’ve followed this process on both Windows and the GitHub UI (making sure my fork has the latest changes before creating the PR), yet the issue continues. This is proving to be frustrating. Could you help clarify what might be causing this issue and suggest updates to the contributing guidelines? I’ve never encountered such a problem in any other open source repositories I’ve contributed to.

Here are two examples of the issue:

1. My latest PR, which is experiencing the issue: PR #32889
2. The previous PR I created, which I updated using both methods but still encountered the issue: PR #32850

Links

https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

[ashishdhingra]

@azarboon Good morning. Thanks for opening the issue. Since your platform is Windows, could you please check if you got any errors when cloning or creating a fork of CDK repo, refer #32808? Do you have access to Linux environment and see if the issue goes away?

On a side note, fork could go out of date as commits are pushed to upstream repository. So it needs to be refreshed periodically manually.

Thanks,
Ashish

[azarboon]

@azarboon Good morning. Thanks for opening the issue. Since your platform is Windows, could you please check if you got any errors when cloning or creating a fork of CDK repo, refer #32808? Do you have access to Linux environment and see if the issue goes away?

On a side note, fork could go out of date as commits are pushed to upstream repository. So it needs to be refreshed periodically manually.

Thanks, Ashish

Yes, I encountered that issue, and I am the author of both reports. Initially, I assumed the problem was related to Windows, so I created the PR using the GitHub UI. Please note that when using the GitHub UI, I did not encounter any errors during the cloning process; however, my PRs remain outdated.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to Linux. I am using VS Code along with the Bash terminal. I also attempted using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) terminal, but the issue persists.

I manually refreshed the repository and confirmed that it was up to date before creating the PR, but the issue continues to persist.