One of the things that I’ve always missed in DVCS is the ability to refuse commits in a branch that’s shared by multiple people based on a test suite run. Sure, it’s possible to have a pre-commit hook - but that would mean that you’d have to wait for the full test suite to run until the commit finishes. With the time it takes to run the Samba testsuite, this is not really an option.
One of the things that would work is to have everybody work in a separate branch and then have some sort of tool that merges those revisions from everybody’s personal branches that worked ok. However, to my knowledge, there is no such tool for Subversion.
Bazaar uses a tool called PQM (Patch Queue Manager). PQM usually controls the main branch (for example for Bazaar, it controls bzr.dev), and waits for GPG-signed requests to merge a specific revision into that main branch. Before accepting such a revision, it will try to run the testsuite to make sure it passes. This guarantees that the main branch never contains broken code (as far as can be indicated by the testsuite).
Now that bzr-svn supports true push, it is possible to actually use a PQM with a Subversion branch. I’ve tried it on a smaller branch last week, and am now looking into using this for my Samba work.
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