🤖

• What kind of change does this PR introduce?

CI / infrastructure. Modernizes the Dependabot auto-merge workflow.

• What is the current behavior?

automerge.yml uses the third-party pascalgn/automerge-action@v0.8.4. That action merges based on GitHub's mergeable state and does not reliably wait for status checks, so it both predates and races the required-checks model. With branch protection now requiring backend and frontend, the old action just errors on PRs it cannot merge (e.g. the core-js 2→3 bump run shows a failure).

• What is the new behavior (if this is a feature change)?

Replaces it with GitHub's native auto-merge:

• gh pr merge --auto --squash enables auto-merge on each Dependabot PR. GitHub then merges it only after the required backend and frontend checks pass (branch protection on main). All update types are auto-merged — a bump that breaks the build simply never satisfies the checks and stays open.
• A least-privilege permissions: block (contents: write, pull-requests: write) replaces the broad default token.
• Drops the third-party action (and with it, the check_suite / status triggers the old approach needed).

• Other information:

  • Requires one repo setting: enable Settings → General → "Allow auto-merge" (currently off), otherwise gh pr merge --auto errors. I could not toggle this myself (shared-repo setting). CLI equivalent: gh api -X PATCH repos/JabRef/cloudref -F allow_auto_merge=true.
  • This makes the open Dependabot PR Bump pascalgn/automerge-action from 0.8.4 to 0.16.4 #597 (bump pascalgn/automerge-action to 0.16.4) obsolete; it can be closed.
  • Safety now rests entirely on the required checks. Since the frontend has no runtime tests, a bump that compiles but changes behaviour would still merge — worth keeping in mind, though that matches the requested "merge all updates" policy.