fix qseries -v and guards interaction - rename "status" variable to avoid shadowing an argument - use a better test to determine whether a patch is applied

changegroup.py: delay the loading of the bz2 and zlib modules

Ignore all errors while parsing the branch cache.

small fixes for test-newbranch - hg tip doesn't use the branch cache; use hg log -r in its place - commit doesn't use a HG_MERGE environment variable - change the dates from "0 0" to "1000000 0"