Do we have to merge OwlBot pull requests in order?

[suztomo]

Do we have to merge OwlBot pull requests in order to avoid old changes overriding new changes?

No, the order is not important as long as you "Regenerate" the pull request. The OwlBot service's regeneration uses the latest master branch of googleapis-gen repository.

For example, #8495 ("chore(bazel): [Many APIs] update protobuf to v3.21.7") came before #8534 ("feat: [cloudasset] add a new searchable field kmsKeys").

I merged #8534 first and then regenerated #8495. As the result, the pull request #8495 does not have any diff from main branch.

One of the changes in 8534 was "kmsKeys" field in AssetServiceClient.java. By checking out the branch of #8495, I confirmed that the changes in the pull request does not revert back the recent AssetServiceClient.java changes and there's no changes to merge in java-asset module (because the changes to the module were already merged to main branch by #8534 .

suztomo@suztomo:/tmp/google-cloud-java$ git diff origin/main -- java-asset
suztomo@suztomo:/tmp/google-cloud-java$ git log -1
commit 7ff297af3466723931c6ed5b071f7646738cd2cb (HEAD -> owl-bot-copy-b9f6ecf6eb4737307b25, origin/owl-bot-copy-b9f6ecf6eb4737307b25)
Author: Tomo Suzuki <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Oct 6 23:04:13 2022 +0000

    owlbot manual invocation