bypassing the patch countdown

[Graham Percival]

I was going to wait a month or two before suggesting this, just to
make sure I was fully "up to date", but I'll jump in now.

We instituted the policy of patch countdowns and Patchy after the
lengthy wait for 2.14.0, which was due to a large number of
regression bugs due to patches which either broke the compile, or
broke previously-working output.

However, even after that, I still pushed some commits directly to
staging, bypassing the countdown.  Obviously I did this for
updating the VERSION when making a release, but I also did it for
a few typo fixes as well.

Is this still an accepted practice?  If not, I suggest that it
should be.  If I had to formalize it, I'd say something like "if
two developers with push ability agree that a fix is trivial and
obvious, it can go straight to staging".


(please note that I'm not suggesting that anybody should feel
obligated to make such typo fixes -- instead, I'm checking that
the "door is open".  So that if we manage to get 1 or 2 users who
are able to fix typos, and those fixes are very obvious, they
wouldn't need to wait 2-4 days.  In this case, the "two
developers" would be "1 mentor, and the release or patch
meister".)

Cheers,
- Graham