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W. Trevor King wrote:
> Thinking about this some more, I think that the role of the
> main-branch is to officially sanction the current state of the code as
> "released".  If a series of commits will leave a branch in a
> known-unusable form, they should be carried out in some appropriately
> named development branch.  Then the log of commits to the main branch
> ("bzr log -n 1" for bzr > ) should produce a fairly respectable
> changelog.

This is how we develop bzr itself.  The mainline is controlled by PQM,
which is a tool that merges feature branches, runs the tests, and
commits only if the tests pass.

$ bzr log --short --limit 10
 4534 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-14 [merge]
      (abentley) Implement merge --interactive

 4533 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-14 [merge]
      (jml) Merge in changes from 1.17 branch.

 4532 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-14 [merge]
      (igc) zc.buildout Windows build support (Sidnei da Silva)

 4531 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-13 [merge]
      (vila) Delete forgotten debug print

 4530 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-13 [merge]
      (vila) Isolate some tests from TZ

 4529 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-13 [merge]
      (igc) Bazaar 2.0 Upgrade Guide

 4528 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-13 [merge]
      (mbp) correction to news

 4527 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-13 [merge]
      (jml) Merge in 1.17 branch, updating version numbers and NEWS file.

 4526 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-10 [merge]
      (mbp, vila) Finish the *_implementation to per_* test renaming

 4525 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-10 [merge]
      (vila) Quicker check for changes in mutable trees

You can also see all the merges as they come into the mainline:

$ bzr log --short --limit 10 --include-merges
 4534 Canonical.com Patch Queue Manager	2009-07-14 [merge]
      (abentley) Implement merge --interactive

      4526.6.15 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-14
                Update command help

      4526.6.14 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-14
                Use default DiffWriter.

      4526.6.13 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-14
                Add docstring to do_interactive.

      4526.6.12 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-14
                Updates from review.

      4526.6.11 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-13
                Update NEWS.

      4526.6.10 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-13 [merge]
                Merged apply-vocab into merge-interactive.

           4526.7.4 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-13 [merge]
                    Merged bzr.dev into apply-vocab.

       4526.6.9 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-13 [merge]
                Merged apply-vocab into merge-interactive.

           4526.7.3 Aaron Bentley	2009-07-13
                    Test shelve_change.

> This also means that _every_commit_ to a main branch would
> be an official release.

We don't do that.  We have official releases every 4 weeks, but we do
believe that running bzr.dev is pretty safe, because it's always tested
and our test suite is quite thorough.

Aaron
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