announcing feed-pqm

[Andrew Bennetts]

Martin Pool wrote:
> We now have branches proposed against 2.0, 2.1, trunk, etc and
> manually feeding them to pqm is a bit annoying.
> 
> If you pull the tip of https://launchpad.net/hydrazine and run
> 'feed-pqm bzr' it will take you through all the merge proposals marked
> Approved, and you can type
> 
>  m - set the commit message for this mp
>  q - give up
>  s - send it to pqm
>  n - see the next
> 
> This seems pretty nice.

More than nice, it sounds wonderful!  I will certainly be trying this
out soon.

This suggests that we need to be a little bit stricter about our use of
the Approved status than we (or at least I) have been so far.  Sometimes
I have been using Approved for things that are approved, but not
instantly ready, i.e. like bb:tweak.

I've been doing this because none of the other statuses fit quite right.
It's obviously not Rejected or Merged.  It's not Need Review, it's
already been adequately reviewed.

You could argue that it's Work in Progress, but that feels like a
negative thing to tell the proposer, because it feels like you're
setting the proposal back a step, rather than forward a step.  Also,
there would be the question of how to readily distinguish "Work in
Progress == Almost Ready" from "Work in Progress == Barely Started".  I
want Almost Ready to be much more visible than Barely Started; they
represent valuable work that can probably be landed with only a few
minutes effort.

The best fit at the moment seems to be "Work in Progress" + "Approve
votes", which at least keeps it on the +activereviews queue and conveys
approximately the right message, but I feel there should be a better
answer.  One thing that lacks is a direct way for one reviewer to say
another's "Needs Fixing" reply has been adequately handled, although I
suppose if *all* review issues have been handled the overall status can
be Approved.  But I do think there's an important part of a merge
proposal's lifecycle that occurs just before full and final approval
that isn't being adequately handled.

-Andrew.