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bot-comment retry scan fails with "jq: Argument list too long" on PRs with many comments — undispositioned bot comments are never retried #2072
Description
Summary
The bot-comment retry scan added in #2022 fails closed on PRs with many comments: jq is invoked with the whole comment list as a command-line argument and exits with Argument list too long, so the scan skips the PR and never retries its undispositioned bot comments.
Evidence — PR #1953 (2026-10-07)
pr-review run 37660413486 (workflow_dispatch, head 01aaf93) logged:
[bot-comment-retry] scripts/lib/bot-comment-retry.sh: line 230: /usr/bin/jq: Argument list too long
[bot-comment-retry] [warn] bot-comment retry: could not read PR 1953 comments in petry-projects/.github-private — skipping (fail closed)
The gate in the same run withheld approval because 4 PR issue comments lacked a verified disposition. The retry that exists to clear exactly that case never ran. On 2026-10-04 the same scan worked on this PR (it dispatched a retry for one CodeRabbit comment); the comment history has grown since.
Cause
scripts/lib/bot-comment-retry.sh (~L230) passes the fetched comments to jq via --argjson or an argument, which hits the OS argument-size limit (ARG_MAX) once the JSON is large.
Proposed fix
Feed the comment JSON to jq on stdin or from a file (jq --slurpfile / jq < file), never as an argument. Apply to every jq --argjson/--arg call in the retry library that carries comment bodies.
Acceptance criteria
- The scan reads PRs with thousands of comments and several MB of comment text without error.
- A fetch or parse failure still fails closed, with a distinct warning from the size case.
- bats test with a synthetic large comment set (well over ARG_MAX).
Generated by Claude Code
Activity
don-petry commentedon Oct 7, 2026
Dev-Lead Implementation Plan
Issue: #2072 — bot-comment retry scan fails with "jq: Argument list too long" on PRs with many comments
Scope
Stop
bcr_fetch_pr_commentsfrom passing accumulated comment JSON tojqas command-line arguments (--argjson); stream each page to a temp file and merge withjq -sreading the file, and emit a distinct stderr reason for each fail-closed path.Implementation Checklist
scripts/lib/bot-comment-retry.sh:bcr_fetch_pr_commentsappends each page'snodesarray to a temp file and merges withjq -cs 'add'(no--argjsonof comment data); temp file removed on every path[warn]on stderr for API failure / GraphQL errors / unparseable page / invalid pagination / merge failure (still returns 1, echoes nothing on stdout)--arg/--argjsonuses in the retry library and callers (dev-lead-retry.sh,dev-lead-intent.sh) — only L230 carries comment bodiesTests to Write
tests/dev-lead/unit/test_bot_comment_retry.bats: synthetic multi-page response (thousands of comments, several MB — well over ARG_MAX) is read and returned in fullTest Command
bats tests/dev-lead/unit/test_bot_comment_retry.bats tests/dev-lead/unit/test_intent_bot_comment_retry.batsdon-petry commentedon Oct 7, 2026
Dev-Lead: Implementation Complete — PR #2073
The implementation for issue #2072 is durable: commits are pushed and a pull request is open. This record is backed by verifiable artifacts you can confirm in one click.
42f2e0f6bde1ce02a24764772b390acc415556a5main: 2 file(s), +112/-16 linesReview happens on the PR. Acceptance criteria and test results are evidenced by the PR's diff and CI checks — not asserted here. If a later stage fails, this claim is retracted in place.
fix(dev-lead): reject a non-advancing comment cursor and always clean…
feat: implement issue #2072 — bot-comment retry scan fails with "jq: …