Last week was a solid week for GitHub releases. While only one stands out to me as super helpful, there was still a substantial showing of new features released and other subtler changes made to ease our lives.
Last week’s big news is that merge queues are now in a public beta. Have you ever been about to merge a PR only for someone to beat you to it, and now you need to update your PR, rerun CI, and get a new approval? Merge queues will help and handle most of the tedious work for you.
Merge queues will not inherently solve the problem of merge conflicts. However, they will make it easier to work in smaller chunks, which is the best strategy for avoiding merge conflicts.
This is not a feature that every repo or team will need, but for those who do, I think this will be a massive quality-of-life improvement.
Also worth noting is that enabling merge queues will require updates to your pipelines so that checks run at the right time.
on:
pull_request:
merge_group:
There were a couple of significant improvements to permissions. Dependabot alerts are now visible to anyone with write or maintain roles on a repo. Also, we can now create custom roles to manage branch protection rules. Previously, those things were limited to repo admins, leading to devs with more permission than they should have or no access to the tools they need.
GitHub also tweaked the Dependency graph for some JVM projects to show how you can get more info from your build into the graph. This is something that JavaScript projects already get out of the box, but it’s great that GitHub is making it easier for other languages to get these features.
Will merge queues make your team’s workflow better?
Dan Cook 