What is a Patch Queue Manager?
A Patch Queue Manager (PQM) is a program that sits on top of a repository (or set of repositories) and handles all kind of write access to it according to a set of policies like:
- who is allowed to commit (security)
- when access is opened (for release engineering tasks)
- which branches are open and to whom
- generate commit messages
- handle merge request from remote repositories (for synchronisation)
- and so on...
The nice thing is that a PQM can be VCS-neutral (although a centralised VCS doesn't need such a system).
What are the available options
The one I know of is the Bazaar one, inherited from Arch/tla days written by Robert Collins and now maintained through his work at Canonical. More information here. The repository can be found here: PQM repository in bzr format