It’s another monthly burst of news about bors-ng, a GitHub App that acts as the last-step in a code review workflow by taking human-approved pull requests and making sure they pass all the tests when merged against master.

In the last month, we landed 11 PRs in the bors-ng repository.

“This Month in Bors” is written in public on GitHub. If you find a mistake, pull requests or issue reports are appreciated!

Notable Additions

• abeltensor added a “nothing to see here” indicator to the front page and the repository list page
• notriddle fixed bad crash handling in cases when GitHub times out or is down
• kimsaehun shortened the commit ID at the bottom of the screen
• kimsaehum made bors-ng infer that you’re using CodeShip based on the presence of appropriate config files in your repo
• GustavoCaso removed a redundant notification when you logged in
• GustavoCaso changed the command parser to match the name “bors” case-insensitively (so “Bors r+” is a valid way to approve a PR now)

New Contributors

• @abeltensor
• @kimsaehun
• @GustavoCaso

Want to see your name in this newsletter? Look at bors starters, a curated list of issues that are good for new contributors!

Who’s using bors?

This month’s featured user is pyvisa, a Python library for the Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA), not to be confused with the credit card payment processor or the paperwork used to move between countries.

VISA is a standard hardware interface for Testing and Measurement (T&M) devices. VISA defines high-level message-passing semantics, as well as protocols for tunneling over common physical connects (some are measurement-specific like GPIB, while others are generic like USB and TCP/IP). It also defines a C API for applications to talk to an implementation of the protocol.

The main pyvisa library, as such, is a plugabble frontend with two official backends. One backend uses ctypes FFI, and other backend is a pure Python implementation of the VISA wire protocol (over USB, TCP/IP, and Serial, though more physical protocol support is in the works). You can also develop your own backend and pyvisa can dynamically load it.

Got any suggestions for next month? Post a comment on the November pull request.