pqm for bzr development

[Martin Pool]

I'd like to give more committers the ability to commit into bzr.dev.

pqm is a "patch queue manager", a process tool originally written (by
Colin Walters?) for Arch and now ported by Robert to bazaar and
bazaar-ng.  It's a robot that does merges between branches in response
to user commands and can enforce policy such as making sure that tests
run before code merges into a particular branch.

I suggest we start using pqm for merges onto the main bzr.dev branch,
rather than me doing them by hand.  This should unblock other
developers who have things to merge in, and free up my time.  (It's
not so much that the changes themself take a long time, but rather the
latency in me coming to merge them.)

pqm takes gpg-signed email as instructions to do a merge from a
published branch into the pqm-maintained branch.  I can imagine
improving this to use a 'bzr submit' command or to periodically
automatically merge from a ready-to-merge branch, but we can do that
later.

Anyone who has pqm access should feel free to pick up patches to the
list and merge them in.  Please followup to the list so we can see
that's been done.

There are a fair number of things where we don't all agree on the
right way to proceed.  If there's a change that seems controversial,
large or risky then it'd be better to post the branch or diff to the
list first for review.  This applies to me too.  One benefit of this
would be for me to have my own development branch more distinct from
bzr.dev.

We've been doing pretty well on adding tests for new features and
bugfixes, and I think continuing to do this is very important for
people committing directly.  Robert and I have been following the
test-driven-development rule of writing and running tests first before
writing code (to check they fail), and I recommend this way of
working.  If there's a change which you can't work out how to test
then try bouncing it off people on the list or #bzr.

We should have pqm send out mail when it does a merge so they can be
post-reviewed.

To start with I'd give commit to me, robertc, aaron, john and
alexander, and expand that as needed.

How does that sound?

--
Martin