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    The blog post wanted to see if adding bots to an open source project would improve the likelihood of a pull request being accepted or not. Seems like it solidly does!

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        without a human permission,

        A human (with permission) must first say r+ on the PR before bors will start to run the tests.

        what would be the point of having bors?

        Humans are fallible, and sometimes miss things the tests catch.

        Furthermore, while a developer could run the tests on their own machine, we support a large number of architectures and options, bors runs the tests on all of them. See also the other features I list below.

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          Having an impartial observer checkout the code and run the tests is a good way to avoid burning out human maintainers on halfsssed submissions, and the quick feedback (even when negative) helps keep submitters interested.

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              github implements its own automatic test bots

              You’re thinking of GitLab, I think.

              What does bors do exactly?

              A few things. When PRs are r+’d, they’re put into a queue. Bors pops each PR off of the queue, and coordinates running the tests on a fleet of machines controlled by buildbot. If they pass, bors merges the PR into master and starts the process again.

              Bors has a number of other features as well, see https://buildbot.rust-lang.org/homu/ for an overview. Stuff like

              • delegating the review of a PR to someone who doesn’t have regular commit access
              • setting priorities to bump a PR to the top of the queue
              • Creating ‘rollups’ of multiple PRs
              • Retrying the builds if they fail for some unrelated reason
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                  as impartial as possible.

                  I’m not sure impartiality is really a goal for us.