tl;dr. Our beloved @marge-bot is behaving much more reliably now thanks to improvements in CI reliability and build batching. To merge an (accepted) merge request simply designate @marge-bot as its assignee. Marge will handle the rest. If things go awry let me know. Hi everyone, As you may have noticed, over the last weeks we have been feeling out how best to leverage our new CI infrastructure, particularly when it comes to merging patches. As mentioned a few weeks ago, we have introduced a bot, Marge, to help us work around some temporary limitations of GitLab's merge workflow. Unfortunately, Marge had her own set of quirks which have taken a while to sort out. In particular, fragile tests tended to result in repeated merge attempts which tended to clog up CI, leading to an avalanche of waiting, build failures, and general despair. However, we have been working to improve this situation in three ways: * provisioning more builder capacity to reduce wait times * fixing or disabling fragile tests to reduce the need for retries * enable Marge's batched merge functionality, reducing the number of builds necessary per merged patch [1] In light of this I just wanted to reiterate the previous guidance on merging patches. If you have a merge request you would like to merge simply do the following: 1. make sure that it has at least one approval. This should happen in the course of code review but do ping if this was forgotten. 2. assign the merge request to @marge-bot using the assignee field in the right-hand sidebar of the merge request page. 3. next time Marge does a batch of merges she will fold in your MR (leaving a helpful comment to let you know) and, if the batch passes CI, merge it. If not she will leave a comment letting you know there was an issue. I will try to step in to sort out the mess when this happens. Do let me know if you have any questions. Cheers, - Ben [1] thanks to Matthew Pickering for picking this up