Issue Unapprove

ghqc issue unapprove reverses an approval by posting an unapproval comment and reopening the issue. It is typically used when further changes are needed after a file was previously approved.

ghqc issue unapprove

Interactive

Run ghqc issue unapprove with no issue-specific arguments to enter the full prompt flow.

ghqc issue unapprove

Steps

1. Select a Milestone

The interactive flow starts by selecting an existing open milestone.

Only open milestones are shown
If there are no open milestones, the command stops and asks you to create one first

🚫 Welcome to GHQC Unapprove Mode!
? Select a milestone:
> 🎯 PK Review
  🎯 Round 2

2. Select an Issue

After choosing the milestone, ghqc loads the issues in that milestone and narrows the list to closed issues only.

Open issues are excluded because they are already active
The prompt uses autocomplete, so typing part of the file path is usually enough
If the milestone has no closed issues, the command stops rather than continuing with an empty prompt

? 🎫 Enter issue title (use Tab for autocomplete):
> scripts/helper.R
  scripts/model-fit.R

3. Provide a Reason

Unapproval requires an explicit reason.

Empty input is rejected
The provided reason is included directly in the unapproval comment body

? 📝 Enter reason for unapproval: Found more changes to be made

Summary

Before posting, interactive mode prints a short summary of the unapproval configuration.

milestone
issue number and title
reason

Non-interactive

To skip interactive mode, you must provide all three:

--milestone
--file
--reason

Any partial combination fails fast instead of dropping into a mixed prompt mode.

ghqc issue unapprove \
  --milestone "PK Review" \
  --file scripts/helper.R \
  --reason "Follow-up changes are required after the latest update."

Options

Flag	Description
`-m, --milestone`	Milestone name for the QC issue.
`-f, --file`	Repository-relative file path of the issue to unapprove.
`-r, --reason`	Reason for reopening the issue.

Validation and Defaults

The provided milestone and file must resolve to an existing GHQC issue
Interactive mode only offers closed issues for selection
--reason is required in non-interactive mode
The reason must be non-empty in interactive mode

After the unapproval comment is posted, ghqc reopens the issue automatically.

Impacted Issues

After reopening the issue, ghqc may also print downstream QCs that could be affected by the unapproval.

If no downstream dependencies are found, only the reopen result is shown
If dependency information is available, ghqc prints a tree of impacted issues
If the hosting API does not support the necessary dependency queries, ghqc prints a warning instead

This is especially useful when the issue being unapproved was marked as a gating or previous QC for later work.

Example Impact Tree

🚫 Issue unapproved and reopened!
https://github.com/org/repo/issues/42#issuecomment-192837465

The following QCs may be impacted by this unapproval:
#57 scripts/model-fit.R (Round 2) (gating QC)
└── #63 reports/final-report.qmd (Round 2) (previous QC)

What Gets Captured

The posted comment is a QC unapproval comment, not a generic GitHub comment.

The comment starts with # QC Un-Approval
The reason is repeated near the top of the comment body
The metadata block records the issue number and unapproval reason
After posting the comment, ghqc reopens the GitHub issue

Example

# QC Un-Approval

Follow-up changes are required after the latest update.

## Metadata
* issue: #42
* unapproval reason: Follow-up changes are required after the latest update.