[ANNOUNCEMENT] Change in MR landing procedure

[Ben Gamari]

tl;dr. On Thursday 10 Dec, Marge-bot will be relocated to a retirement
       facility. Her duties will henceforth be carried out by GitLab's
       Merge Train functionality.


Hi all,

When GHC moved to GitLab two years ago the platform lacked a critical
feature: the ability to manage a queue of merge requests slated to be
merged. For the past two years we have been using @marge-bot for this
functionality. While Marge has served us well, she also introduces her
fair share of failure modes.

In the meantime GitLab has grown proper support for our use-case in the
form of the "merge train" mechanism [1]. In light of Marge's growing
intransigence [2], I will grant her a well-earned retirement and begin
using merge trains for merging MRs starting on Thursday.

As a result, the workflow for adding a merge request to the merge queue
will become a bit more straightforward: Instead of setting the MR's
"assignee" to @marge-bot rather push the blue "Start/add to merge train"
button. This adds the merge request to the merge queue. This is
documented in the Wiki [3].

Apart from freeing us from the need to maintain Marge, this change also
enables us to use GitLab's branch-squashing functionality, which Marge
did not support.

Do let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

So long, Marge, and thanks for all of the commits.

Cheers,

 - Ben


[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/merge_request_pipelines/pipelines_for_merged_results/merge_trains/
[2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19034
[3] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/Contributing-a-Patch
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