planning for bzr 1.6 binaries for Windows

[Mark Hammond]

Hi all,
  As some of you know, I'm working on Toritoise for Bazaar, and in the
process incorporating Tortoise into the "official" Bazaar binaries for
windows as an optional component.  It also seems to make sense that I create
these binaries, so I'm seeking some guidance on how to proceed.

My plan is to create a bzr binary with default plugins of 'launchpad',
'qbzr' and 'svn'.  This is almost ready; I'm working on a more recent
version of the svn plugin.  I've updated the wiki page at
http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrWin32Installer with the process I'm using.  The
installer for such a binary weighs in at 14.5 MB and takes up just over 50MB
once installed, with the Qt4 DLLs being the biggest culprit.  In the future
we might like to create the ability to install these components separately,
but that's not easy in the short term give the state of py2exe.

Does this sound reasonable?  Are there any other plugins we should ship by
default?  Note that QBzr is a dependency of TortoiseBzr (which is also up
for discussion, but preferably in a different thread ;)

Moving forward, I hope to have a new binary over the next few days suitable
for testing.  I'm wondering what process we follow after that point:  How do
we "advertise" and make the binary available to people?  Should there be an
"incubation" period before we start to recommend it, or do we just
test-and-bless it, then make it the "official" 1.6 binaries for windows
(noting that 1.6 itself is still beta), and aim to have it fairly solid by
the time 1.6 hits?  Or maybe I'm jumping the gun?

Thanks,

Mark