January 6, 2026
HTTP on a crash diet
Investigating and fixing a nasty clone bug
Merge bot’s message goes missing, crowd blames “hungry retries” and fights over cloning
TLDR: A bors merge bot hit a bug where update requests lost their data during retries. Comments blame auto-retry eating the payload and reignite debate over making cloning easier in Rust—some say it prevents footguns, others say it hides them. It matters because silent retries can break real systems.
A dev trying to ship the bors merge bot hit a spooky glitch: sometimes their update request showed up with an empty body, and the mock GitHub server freaked out. Cue the comments rolling in with war stories and popcorn. One engineer swore they’d seen the exact thing: when the system retried a request (switching from old-school IPv4 to newer IPv6), the data had already been eaten. Translation for non-nerds: the bot tried to resend the same package, but the box was already opened and empty.
That one comment lit up the crowd. Some blamed “magic” auto-retry code for silently swallowing data. Others side-eyed the test setup, accusing it of being “too real” and exposing ghosts no one wants to admit exist. There were memes galore—“the Internet ate my homework,” “PATCH on a diet,” and the fan favorite: Schrödinger’s request body. Then the drama escalated into the hot Rust debate over the Ergonomic cloning plan—basically, making it easier to copy stuff in code. Fans said this would stop these one-and-done data mishaps; skeptics called it a sugar coat that hides footguns. The vibe: equal parts bug autopsy and talk-show panel, with discussion threads turning into therapy sessions for anyone who’s been burned by retries.
Key Points
- •The bors GitHub merge bot uses integration-heavy tests with real Postgres and mocked GitHub endpoints via wiremock.
- •A mocked PATCH endpoint intermittently received empty request bodies, causing deserialization to panic.
- •On the sender side, octocrab issued PATCH requests with a JSON body containing sha and force.
- •The failure occurred only after several calls to the endpoint, indicating a non-deterministic or state-related behavior.
- •The investigation suggests the bug’s cause is related to Rust’s Ergonomic cloning initiative, prompting scrutiny of dependencies like wiremock.