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The origin story of merge queues
From Bors and Homu to Bulldozer, Kodiak, Mergify, and now GitHub and GitLab, merge queues have shaped how we keep main branches green. This article traces their history, why they emerged, and how they became a standard in modern software development.
Bors integrated with Rust's build farm and GitHub: it would monitor pull requests, wait for a reviewer's "approve" command, merge the PR into a temporary branch, and run the full test suite. Uber, for instance, built a system called SubmitQueue to verify and land changes in their monorepo, reducing CI wait times by 74% and dramatically improving merge throughput while keeping the mainline green. What began as Graydon Hoare's small Rust bot named after a knight (Bors) has grown into a standard tool in software teams' arsenal, ensuring that code integration is"not rocket science" but a well-engineered process.
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