~abentley/bzrtools/bzrtools.dev

Notes to packagers

##################

Hi there,

Thank you for packaging Bzrtools.  Here are some notes.

Bazaar version

==============

Bzrtools' major and minor version number should be the same as Bazaar's.

Newer versions of Bzrtools may use APIs that are not present in older Bazaar

versions.  To be on the safe side, Bzrtools disables itself in this

situation.

Old versions of Bzrtools may use APIs that are deprecated in newer versions

of Bazaar.  The deprecation period is one release, typically one month.

So technically, slightly old versions of Bzrtools should work with newer

versions of Bazaar.  But even so, they will emit unpleasant deprecation

warnings.

In order to make things easier on maintainers, I've adopted the policy of

releasing Bzrtools around the same time as the Bazaar release candidate.

This gives you about a week of lead time before the final Bazaar release.

Bzrtools releases are announced the bazaar@canonical.com and

bazaar-announce@canonical.com mailing lists.

Other dependencies

==================

Certain bzrtools use or can use tools from the following packages:

- rsync       (rspush)

- diff        (shelve/unshelve)

- patch       (shelve/unshelve)

- pybaz       (baz-import)

- graphviz    (graph-ancestry)

- librsvg-bin (for antialiasing in graph-ancestry)

These can be treated as recommended rather than hard dependencies, because

many bzrtools commands will function properly without them.

Additionally, the test suite uses testresources:

http://www.robertcollins.net/unittest/testresources/

Testing

=======

Note that Medusa is not required for the Bzrtools test suite.  Medusa is used

strictly by Bazaar.  ``bzr selftest bzrtools`` will suggest installing

Medusa because ``bzr selftest`` always suggests installing Medusa, if it is

not already installed.

If you prefer, you can run the ``test.py`` script provided.  It runs the same

tests as ``bzr selftest bzrtools``.