continuing anothers work - launchpad merge proposals, mail spam

[Robert Collins]

So I picked up a few old patches yesterday, tidied them up and pushed
them to LP to get my tidiness reviewed (where it was non trivial).

This wasn't really any different to what we've done in the past, from
time to time, in landing via PQM someone elses patch - and what we do
for non committers all the time.

Its worked well and it worked badly...

It worked well by giving Andrew and I a merge proposal to iterate on
the terminal spew thing, to use feed-pqm to land it, and to record our
discussions.

It worked badly by:
 - splitting the conversation in two when we really wanted just one
   https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-code/+bug/596726
 - generating a huge fresh diff rather than an incremental diff to the
default review team
 - being surprising to at least one other review team member ;)

I think overall it is a net positive and I'd like to keep doing that -
not for every patch that is proffered by other committers, but for:
 - patches that other committers seem to have abandoned
 - and patches from non committers
 - where the patch pilot or some other interested party thinks that
the patch needs some help to move forward

I don't want to stress or annoy folk though, and I think it might at
the moment. We can address part of it, I think, by using a
prerequisite branch of the existing MP; this is a bit of a hack, when
really it would be nice to grab the MP and just change the proposed
source branch - but that requires deeper work in LP, and while we
should ask/work towards that, we don't really need to wait for that.

What say ye all?
-Rob