Something like "darcs record" / "hg record" == Select changes to commit.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> At some point Ben Finney wrote

 > Because of the above issue, I think Bazaar should not have the behaviour
 > you describe.

It seems to me that Ben's opinion is clearly opposed to the general
trend of Bazaar development, which is to allow users to develop their
own workflows and have Bazaar manage them conveniently.  If Ben
doesn't like it, he can just resist the temptation to abuse it.  As
Pythonistas say, "we're all consenting adults around here."  Whether
it's worth going beyond the "edit the diff" interface that bzr shelve
already has to a more interactive hunk selection mechanism like that
of Darcs is unclear to me.[1]

And there are other tools (patch queue managers and buildbots) which
are much better fitted to managing a "test every commit" policy than
any VCS can be.  

Perhaps it would be a useful feature if there could be lightweight
tags ("properties" a la svn?) that such ex post testing could attach
to identify "good" and "bad" commits.

Footnotes: 
[1]  The only time I ever used Darcs in anger, I had volunteered to
turn a 5MB patch into a reviewable sequence of changesets.  It was
precisely the hunk-selection interface that made Darcs attractive, but
in the end it was way too tedious, and I ended up using an obscure
program called diff-mode.el by an even more obscure hacker named
"Stefan Monnier" to do most of the work.  Funny how these things come
back around....