bors — consistent automated testing

Automate the consolidation of git branches submitted by developers and test the merge results with your CI system (Travis CI, BuildBot, etc.) before commiting to the production master branch.

Running tests on each developer's branch is not sufficent. They may conflict in a semantic way that causes the master branch to fail when merged. Additional work that is built on such a broken master branch is tainted, unable to tell which failures are the result of an existing bug or a new one.

Instead, the combined system must be tested, as a whole, before the work becomes a part of the master branch which will form the basis of future work. Doing so, as work continues unabated, will force a backlog to be enqueued.

This system should be automated. The tool that automates this is called bors.

This May, I added support for gating on the new GitHub Checks API

This April, we added restricted retry and custom committer support

This March, we added support for gating Bors on GitHub Reviews

This February, we added some info to make things easier for self-hosters.

This January, we made bors-ng easier to deploy, hack on, and debug.

This December, a few common sources of confusion were remedied.