Patch Pilot report

[Martin Pool]

Today I'm concluding my patch pilot rotation.  There's no patch pilot
assigned for next week, though if someone would like to step up do go
ahead.  Andrew will be the patch pilot for week commencing on the 4th
of January.

We got to a nice milestone that there are no more very old outstanding
reviews.  The embarrassingly old 'update -r' branch I finished off
with help from John and put in to 2.1.

The oldest outstanding proposal is now just two days old, which is a
pleasing way to end the year.  It would be great if we can keep it at
this level (or even faster) next year.

I also merged Aaron's long spec for nested trees into devnotes.
Trying to get this just right has been difficult for us.  I think at
least doing that is a step forward.  We may pick it up next year,
especially in the context of making nested trees work with foreign
branches.

There is a less happy outcome that
<https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~denys.duchier/bzr/bzr.ssl/+merge/10254>
is technically ok but can't be merged at the moment because Denys
feels he cannot agree to the contributor agreement because the terms
are overbroad.  Those are reasonable concerns and I'm working with
people at Canonical to get some better and clearer text in place.
It's important that the agreement both be reasonable in intent and
also clearly express that intent.

This is worth repeating:

> I'll post a general reminder that our next release will be 2.1rc1 on
> the 21st of January, about 5 weeks from now.  At that point we will
> branch off 2.1 onto a stable-bugfix-only release.  Changes that are
> relatively risky, or that change APIs or user behaviour will then have
> to go into trunk for the 2.2 release.  So if you do have any changes
> that deprecate APIs, change user visible behaviour or add features for
> 2.1 and that are not too risky, send them up now.

Overall this has been a good experiment: I think we're improving our
pace a lot and hopefully are still making it easier to make changes,
both for new and longstanding contributors.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>