Doctests

We make selective use of doctests. In general they should provide examples within the API documentation which can incidentally be tested. We don't try to test every important case using doctests -- regular Python tests are generally a better solution.

Most of these are in bzrlib/doc/api. More additions are welcome.

Skipping tests and test requirements

In our enhancements to unittest we allow for some addition results beyond just success or failure.

If a test can't be run, it can say that it's skipped. This is typically used in parameterized tests - for example if a transport doesn't support setting permissions, we'll skip the tests that relating to that.

try:
    return self.branch_format.initialize(repo.bzrdir)
except errors.UninitializableFormat:
    raise tests.TestSkipped('Uninitializable branch format')

Raising TestSkipped is a good idea when you want to make it clear that the test was not run, rather than just returning which makes it look as if it was run and passed.

Several different cases are distinguished:

TestSkipped

Generic skip; the only type that was present up to bzr 0.18.

TestNotApplicable

The test doesn't apply to the parameters with which it was run. This is typically used when the test is being applied to all implementations of an interface, but some aspects of the interface are optional and not present in particular concrete implementations. (Some tests that should raise this currently either silently return or raise TestSkipped.) Another option is to use more precise parameterization to avoid generating the test at all.

TestPlatformLimit

(Not implemented yet) The test can't be run because of an inherent limitation of the environment, such as not having symlinks or not supporting unicode.

UnavailableFeature

The test can't be run because a dependency (typically a Python library) is not available in the test environment. These are in general things that the person running the test could fix by installing the library. It's OK if some of these occur when an end user runs the tests or if we're specifically testing in a limited environment, but a full test should never see them.

KnownFailure

The test exists but is known to fail, for example because the code to fix it hasn't been run yet. Raising this allows you to distinguish these failures from the ones that are not expected to fail. This could be conditionally raised if something is broken on some platforms but not on others.

We plan to support three modes for running the test suite to control the interpretation of these results. Strict mode is for use in situations like merges to the mainline and releases where we want to make sure that everything that can be tested has been tested. Lax mode is for use by developers who want to temporarily tolerate some known failures. The default behaviour is obtained by bzr selftest with no options, and also (if possible) by running under another unittest harness.

Test feature dependencies

Rather than manually checking the environment in each test, a test class can declare its dependence on some test features. The feature objects are checked only once for each run of the whole test suite.

For historical reasons, as of May 2007 many cases that should depend on features currently raise TestSkipped.)

class TestStrace(TestCaseWithTransport):

    _test_needs_features = [StraceFeature]

This means all tests in this class need the feature. The feature itself should provide a _probe method which is called once to determine if it's available.

These should generally be equivalent to either TestDependencyMissing or sometimes TestPlatformLimit.

Known failures

Known failures are when a test exists but we know it currently doesn't work, allowing the test suite to still pass. These should be used with care, we don't want a proliferation of quietly broken tests. It might be appropriate to use them if you've committed a test for a bug but not the fix for it, or if something works on Unix but not on Windows.

Testing exceptions and errors

It's important to test handling of errors and exceptions. Because this code is often not hit in ad-hoc testing it can often have hidden bugs -- it's particularly common to get NameError because the exception code references a variable that has since been renamed.

In general we want to test errors at two levels:

1. A test in test_errors.py checking that when the exception object is constructed with known parameters it produces an expected string form. This guards against mistakes in writing the format string, or in the str representations of its parameters. There should be one for each exception class.
2. Tests that when an api is called in a particular situation, it raises an error of the expected class. You should typically use assertRaises, which in the Bazaar test suite returns the exception object to allow you to examine its parameters.

In some cases blackbox tests will also want to check error reporting. But it can be difficult to provoke every error through the commandline interface, so those tests are only done as needed -- eg in response to a particular bug or if the error is reported in an unusual way(?) Blackbox tests should mostly be testing how the command-line interface works, so should only test errors if there is something particular to the cli in how they're displayed or handled.

Testing warnings

The Python warnings module is used to indicate a non-fatal code problem. Code that's expected to raise a warning can be tested through callCatchWarnings.

The test suite can be run with -Werror to check no unexpected errors occur.

However, warnings should be used with discretion. It's not an appropriate way to give messages to the user, because the warning is normally shown only once per source line that causes the problem. You should also think about whether the warning is serious enought that it should be visible to users who may not be able to fix it.

Interface implementation testing and test scenarios

There are several cases in Bazaar of multiple implementations of a common conceptual interface. ("Conceptual" because it's not necessary for all the implementations to share a base class, though they often do.) Examples include transports and the working tree, branch and repository classes.

In these cases we want to make sure that every implementation correctly fulfils the interface requirements. For example, every Transport should support the has() and get() and clone() methods. We have a sub-suite of tests in test_transport_implementations. (Most per-implementation tests are in submodules of bzrlib.tests, but not the transport tests at the moment.)

These tests are repeated for each registered Transport, by generating a new TestCase instance for the cross product of test methods and transport implementations. As each test runs, it has transport_class and transport_server set to the class it should test. Most tests don't access these directly, but rather use self.get_transport which returns a transport of the appropriate type.

The goal is to run per-implementation only tests that relate to that particular interface. Sometimes we discover a bug elsewhere that happens with only one particular transport. Once it's isolated, we can consider whether a test should be added for that particular implementation, or for all implementations of the interface.

The multiplication of tests for different implementations is normally accomplished by overriding the test_suite function used to load tests from a module. This function typically loads all the tests, then applies a TestProviderAdapter to them, which generates a longer suite containing all the test variations.

Test scenarios

Some utilities are provided for generating variations of tests. This can be used for per-implementation tests, or other cases where the same test code needs to run several times on different scenarios.

The general approach is to define a class that provides test methods, which depend on attributes of the test object being pre-set with the values to which the test should be applied. The test suite should then also provide a list of scenarios in which to run the tests.

Typically multiply_tests_from_modules should be called from the test module's test_suite function.

Filenames vs URLs

Transports work in URLs. Take note that URLs are by definition only ASCII - the decision of how to encode a Unicode string into a URL must be taken at a higher level, typically in the Store. (Note that Stores also escape filenames which cannot be safely stored on all filesystems, but this is a different level.)

The main reason for this is that it's not possible to safely roundtrip a URL into Unicode and then back into the same URL. The URL standard gives a way to represent non-ASCII bytes in ASCII (as %-escapes), but doesn't say how those bytes represent non-ASCII characters. (They're not guaranteed to be UTF-8 -- that is common but doesn't happen everywhere.)

For example if the user enters the url http://example/%e0 there's no way to tell whether that character represents "latin small letter a with grave" in iso-8859-1, or "latin small letter r with acute" in iso-8859-2 or malformed UTF-8. So we can't convert their URL to Unicode reliably.

Equally problematic if we're given a url-like string containing non-ascii characters (such as the accented a) we can't be sure how to convert that to the correct URL, because we don't know what encoding the server expects for those characters. (Although this is not totally reliable we might still accept these and assume they should be put into UTF-8.)

A similar edge case is that the url http://foo/sweet%2Fsour contains one directory component whose name is "sweet/sour". The escaped slash is not a directory separator. If we try to convert URLs to regular Unicode paths this information will be lost.

This implies that Transports must natively deal with URLs; for simplicity they only deal with URLs and conversion of other strings to URLs is done elsewhere. Information they return, such as from list_dir, is also in the form of URL components.

Deprecation decorators

bzrlib.symbol_versioning provides decorators that can be attached to methods, functions, and other interfaces to indicate that they should no longer be used.

To deprecate a static method you must call deprecated_function (not method), after the staticmethod call:

@staticmethod
@deprecated_function(zero_ninetyone)
def create_repository(base, shared=False, format=None):

When you deprecate an API, you should not just delete its tests, because then we might introduce bugs in them. If the API is still present at all, it should still work. The basic approach is to use TestCase.applyDeprecated which in one step checks that the API gives the expected deprecation message, and also returns the real result from the method, so that tests can keep running.

General Python rules

hasattr should not be used because it swallows exceptions including KeyboardInterrupt. Instead, say something like

if getattr(thing, 'name', None) is None

Code layout

Please write PEP-8 compliant code.

One often-missed requirement is that the first line of docstrings should be a self-contained one-sentence summary.

We use 4 space indents for blocks, and never use tab characters. (In vim, set expandtab.)

Lines should be no more than 79 characters if at all possible. Lines that continue a long statement may be indented in either of two ways:

within the parenthesis or other character that opens the block, e.g.:

my_long_method(arg1,
               arg2,
               arg3)

or indented by four spaces:

my_long_method(arg1,
    arg2,
    arg3)

The first is considered clearer by some people; however it can be a bit harder to maintain (e.g. when the method name changes), and it does not work well if the relevant parenthesis is already far to the right. Avoid this:

self.legbone.kneebone.shinbone.toebone.shake_it(one,
                                                two,
                                                three)

but rather

self.legbone.kneebone.shinbone.toebone.shake_it(one,
    two,
    three)

or

self.legbone.kneebone.shinbone.toebone.shake_it(
    one, two, three)

For long lists, we like to add a trailing comma and put the closing character on the following line. This makes it easier to add new items in future:

from bzrlib.goo import (
    jam,
    jelly,
    marmalade,
    )

There should be spaces between function paramaters, but not between the keyword name and the value:

call(1, 3, cheese=quark)

In emacs:

;(defface my-invalid-face
;  '((t (:background "Red" :underline t)))
;  "Face used to highlight invalid constructs or other uglyties"
;  )

(defun my-python-mode-hook ()
 ;; setup preferred indentation style.
 (setq fill-column 79)
 (setq indent-tabs-mode nil) ; no tabs, never, I will not repeat
;  (font-lock-add-keywords 'python-mode
;                         '(("^\\s *\t" . 'my-invalid-face) ; Leading tabs
;                            ("[ \t]+$" . 'my-invalid-face)  ; Trailing spaces
;                            ("^[ \t]+$" . 'my-invalid-face)); Spaces only
;                          )
 )

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'my-python-mode-hook)

The lines beginning with ';' are comments. They can be activated if one want to have a strong notice of some tab/space usage violations.

Module Imports

• Imports should be done at the top-level of the file, unless there is a strong reason to have them lazily loaded when a particular function runs. Import statements have a cost, so try to make sure they don't run inside hot functions.
• Module names should always be given fully-qualified, i.e. bzrlib.hashcache not just hashcache.

Naming

Functions, methods or members that are "private" to bzrlib are given a leading underscore prefix. Names without a leading underscore are public not just across modules but to programmers using bzrlib as an API. As a consequence, a leading underscore is appropriate for names exposed across modules but that are not to be exposed to bzrlib API programmers.

We prefer class names to be concatenated capital words (TestCase) and variables, methods and functions to be lowercase words joined by underscores (revision_id, get_revision).

For the purposes of naming some names are treated as single compound words: "filename", "revno".

Consider naming classes as nouns and functions/methods as verbs.

Try to avoid using abbreviations in names, because there can be inconsistency if other people use the full name.

Standard Names

revision_id not rev_id or revid

Functions that transform one thing to another should be named x_to_y (not x2y as occurs in some old code.)

Destructors

Python destructors (__del__) work differently to those of other languages. In particular, bear in mind that destructors may be called immediately when the object apparently becomes unreferenced, or at some later time, or possibly never at all. Therefore we have restrictions on what can be done inside them.

0. Never use a __del__ method without asking Martin/Robert first.
1. Never rely on a __del__ method running. If there is code that must run, do it from a finally block instead.
2. Never import from inside a __del__ method, or you may crash the interpreter!!
3. In some places we raise a warning from the destructor if the object has not been cleaned up or closed. This is considered OK: the warning may not catch every case but it's still useful sometimes.

Factories

In some places we have variables which point to callables that construct new instances. That is to say, they can be used a lot like class objects, but they shouldn't be named like classes:

> I think that things named FooBar should create instances of FooBar when > called. Its plain confusing for them to do otherwise. When we have > something that is going to be used as a class - that is, checked for via > isinstance or other such idioms, them I would call it foo_class, so that > it is clear that a callable is not sufficient. If it is only used as a > factory, then yes, foo_factory is what I would use.

Registries

Several places in Bazaar use (or will use) a registry, which is a mapping from names to objects or classes. The registry allows for loading in registered code only when it's needed, and keeping associated information such as a help string or description.

Lazy Imports

To make startup time faster, we use the bzrlib.lazy_import module to delay importing modules until they are actually used. lazy_import uses the same syntax as regular python imports. So to import a few modules in a lazy fashion do:

from bzrlib.lazy_import import lazy_import
lazy_import(globals(), """
import os
import subprocess
import sys
import time

from bzrlib import (
   errors,
   transport,
   revision as _mod_revision,
   )
import bzrlib.transport
import bzrlib.xml5
""")

At this point, all of these exist as a ImportReplacer object, ready to be imported once a member is accessed. Also, when importing a module into the local namespace, which is likely to clash with variable names, it is recommended to prefix it as _mod_<module>. This makes it clearer that the variable is a module, and these object should be hidden anyway, since they shouldn't be imported into other namespaces.

lazy_import(globals(), """
from module import MyClass
""")

def test(x):
    return isinstance(x, MyClass)

The Null revision

The null revision is the ancestor of all revisions. Its revno is 0, its revision-id is null:, and its tree is the empty tree. When referring to the null revision, please use bzrlib.revision.NULL_REVISION. Old code sometimes uses None for the null revision, but this practice is being phased out.

Processing Command Lines

bzrlib has a standard framework for parsing command lines and calling processing routines associated with various commands. See builtins.py for numerous examples.

Standard Parameter Types

There are some common requirements in the library: some parameters need to be unicode safe, some need byte strings, and so on. At the moment we have only codified one specific pattern: Parameters that need to be unicode should be checked via bzrlib.osutils.safe_unicode. This will coerce the input into unicode in a consistent fashion, allowing trivial strings to be used for programmer convenience, but not performing unpredictably in the presence of different locales.

Test support

We have a rich collection of tools to support writing tests. Please use them in preference to ad-hoc solutions as they provide portability and performance benefits.

tree = self.make_branch_and_tree('path')
builder = TreeBuilder()
builder.start_tree(tree)
builder.build(['foo', "bar/", "bar/file"])
tree.commit('commit the tree')
builder.finish_tree()

builder = BranchBuilder(self.get_transport().clone('relpath'))
builder.build_commit()
builder.build_commit()
builder.build_commit()
branch = builder.get_branch()

Doctests

We make selective use of doctests. In general they should provide examples within the API documentation which can incidentally be tested. We don't try to test every important case using doctests -- regular Python tests are generally a better solution.

Most of these are in bzrlib/doc/api. More additions are welcome.

NEWS File

If you make a user-visible change, please add a note to the NEWS file. The description should be written to make sense to someone who's just a user of bzr, not a developer: new functions or classes shouldn't be mentioned, but new commands, changes in behaviour or fixed nontrivial bugs should be listed. See the existing entries for an idea of what should be done.

Within each release, entries in the news file should have the most user-visible changes first. So the order should be approximately:

• changes to existing behaviour - the highest priority because the user's existing knowledge is incorrect
• new features - should be brought to their attention
• bug fixes - may be of interest if the bug was affecting them, and should include the bug number if any
• major documentation changes
• changes to internal interfaces

People who made significant contributions to each change are listed in parenthesis. This can include reporting bugs (particularly with good details or reproduction recipes), submitting patches, etc.

Commands

The docstring of a command is used by bzr help to generate help output for the command. The list 'takes_options' attribute on a command is used by bzr help to document the options for the command - the command docstring does not need to document them. Finally, the '_see_also' attribute on a command can be used to reference other related help topics.

API Documentation

Functions, methods, classes and modules should have docstrings describing how they are used.

The first line of the docstring should be a self-contained sentence.

For the special case of Command classes, this acts as the user-visible documentation shown by the help command.

The docstrings should be formatted as reStructuredText (like this document), suitable for processing using the epydoc tool into HTML documentation.

Copyright

The copyright policy for bzr was recently made clear in this email (edited for grammatical correctness):

The attached patch cleans up the copyright and license statements in
the bzr source. It also adds tests to help us remember to add them
with the correct text.

We had the problem that lots of our files were "Copyright Canonical
Development Ltd" which is not a real company, and some other variations
on this theme. Also, some files were missing the GPL statements.

I want to be clear about the intent of this patch, since copyright can
be a little controversial.

1) The big motivation for this is not to shut out the community, but
just to clean up all of the invalid copyright statements.

2) It has been the general policy for bzr that we want a single
copyright holder for all of the core code. This is following the model
set by the FSF, which makes it easier to update the code to a new
license in case problems are encountered. (For example, if we want to
upgrade the project universally to GPL v3 it is much simpler if there is
a single copyright holder). It also makes it clearer if copyright is
ever debated, there is a single holder, which makes it easier to defend
in court, etc. (I think the FSF position is that if you assign them
copyright, they can defend it in court rather than you needing to, and
I'm sure Canonical would do the same).
As such, Canonical has requested copyright assignments from all of the
major contributers.

3) If someone wants to add code and not attribute it to Canonical, there
is a specific list of files that are excluded from this check. And the
test failure indicates where that is, and how to update it.

4) If anyone feels that I changed a copyright statement incorrectly, just
let me know, and I'll be happy to correct it. Whenever you have large
mechanical changes like this, it is possible to make some mistakes.

Just to reiterate, this is a community project, and it is meant to stay
that way. Core bzr code is copyright Canonical for legal reasons, and
the tests are just there to help us maintain that.

Command.outf

When a Command object is created, it is given a member variable accessible by self.outf. This is a file-like object, which is bound to sys.stdout, and should be used to write information to the screen, rather than directly writing to sys.stdout or calling print. This file has the ability to translate Unicode objects into the correct representation, based on the console encoding. Also, the class attribute encoding_type will effect how unprintable characters will be handled. This parameter can take one of 3 values:

replace

Unprintable characters will be represented with a suitable replacement marker (typically '?'), and no exception will be raised. This is for any command which generates text for the user to review, rather than for automated processing. For example: bzr log should not fail if one of the entries has text that cannot be displayed.

strict

Attempting to print an unprintable character will cause a UnicodeError. This is for commands that are intended more as scripting support, rather than plain user review. For exampl: bzr ls is designed to be used with shell scripting. One use would be bzr ls --null --unknows | xargs -0 rm. If bzr printed a filename with a '?', the wrong file could be deleted. (At the very least, the correct file would not be deleted). An error is used to indicate that the requested action could not be performed.

exact

Do not attempt to automatically convert Unicode strings. This is used for commands that must handle conversion themselves. For example: bzr diff needs to translate Unicode paths, but should not change the exact text of the contents of the files.

bzrlib.urlutils.unescape_for_display

Because Transports work in URLs (as defined earlier), printing the raw URL to the user is usually less than optimal. Characters outside the standard set are printed as escapes, rather than the real character, and local paths would be printed as file:// urls. The function unescape_for_display attempts to unescape a URL, such that anything that cannot be printed in the current encoding stays an escaped URL, but valid characters are generated where possible.

What is a Core Developer?

While everyone in the Bazaar community is welcome and encouraged to propose and submit changes, a smaller team is reponsible for pulling those changes together into a cohesive whole. In addition to the general developer stuff covered above, "core" developers have responsibility for:

• reviewing changes
• reviewing blueprints
• planning releases
• managing releases.

The Development Lifecycle

As a rule, Bazaar development follows a 4 week cycle:

• 2 weeks - general changes
• 1 week - feature freeze
• 1 week+ - Release Candidate stabilization

During the FeatureFreeze week, the trunk (bzr.dev) is open in a limited way: only low risk changes, critical and high priority fixes are accepted during this time. At the end of FeatureFreeze, a branch is created for the first Release Candidate and the trunk is reopened for general development on the next release. A week or so later, the final release is packaged assuming no serious problems were encountered with the one or more Release Candidates.

Communicating and Coordinating

While it has many advantages, one of the challenges of distributed development is keeping everyone else aware of what you're working on. There are numerous ways to do this:

1. Assign bugs to yourself in Launchpad
2. Mention it on the mailing list
3. Mention it on IRC

As well as the email notifcations that occur when merge requests are sent and reviewed, you can keep others informed of where you're spending your energy by emailing the bazaar-commits list implicitly. To do this, install and configure the Email plugin. One way to do this is add these configuration settings to your central configuration file (e.g. ~/.bazaar/bazaar.conf on Linux):

[DEFAULT]
email = Joe Smith <joe.smith@internode.on.net>
smtp_server = mail.internode.on.net:25

Then add these lines for the relevant branches in locations.conf:

post_commit_to = bazaar-commits@lists.canonical.com
post_commit_mailer = smtplib

While attending a sprint, RobertCollins' Dbus plugin is useful for the same reason. See the documentation within the plugin for information on how to set it up and configure it.

Setting Up Your Workspace for Reviews

TODO: Incorporate John Arbash Meinel's detailed email to Ian C on the numerous ways of setting up integration branches.

The Review Checklist

See A Closer Look at the Merge & Review Process for information on the gates used to decide whether code can be merged or not and details on how review results are recorded and communicated.

The Importance of Timely Reviews

Good reviews do take time. They also regularly require a solid understanding of the overall code base. In practice, this means a small number of people often have a large review burden - with knowledge comes responsibility. No one like their merge requests sitting in a queue going nowhere, so reviewing sooner rather than later is strongly encouraged.

An Overview of PQM

Of the many workflows supported by Bazaar, the one adopted for Bazaar development itself is known as "Decentralized with automatic gatekeeper". To repeat the explanation of this given on http://bazaar-vcs.org/Workflows:

In this workflow, each developer has their own branch or branches, plus read-only access to the mainline. A software gatekeeper (e.g. PQM) has commit rights to the main branch. When a developer wants their work merged, they request the gatekeeper to merge it. The gatekeeper does a merge, a compile, and runs the test suite. If the code passes, it is merged into the mainline.

In a nutshell, here's the overall submission process:

1. get your work ready (including review except for trivial changes)
2. push to a public location
3. ask PQM to merge from that location

As a result, the following things are needed to use PQM for submissions:

1. A publicly available web server
2. Your OpenPGP key registered with PQM (contact RobertCollins for this)
3. The PQM plugin installed and configured (not strictly required but highly recommended).

Selecting a Public Branch Location

If you don't have your own web server running, branches can always be pushed to Launchpad. Here's the process for doing that:

Depending on your location throughout the world and the size of your repository though, it is often quicker to use an alternative public location to Launchpad, particularly if you can set up your own repo and push into that. By using an existing repo, push only needs to send the changes, instead of the complete repository every time. Note that it is easy to register branches in other locations with Launchpad so no benefits are lost by going this way.

It should also be noted that best practice in this area is subject to change as things evolve. For example, once the Bazaar smart server on Launchpad supports server-side branching, the performance situation will be very different to what it is now (Jun 2007).

Configuring the PQM Plug-In

While not strictly required, the PQM plugin automates a few things and reduces the chance of error. Before looking at the plugin, it helps to understand a little more how PQM operates. Basically, PQM requires an email indicating what you want it to do. The email typically looks like this:

star-merge source-branch target-branch

For example:

star-merge http://bzr.arbash-meinel.com/branches/bzr/jam-integration http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev

Note that the command needs to be on one line. The subject of the email will be used for the commit message. The email also needs to be gpg signed with a key that PQM accepts.

The advantages of using the PQM plugin are:

1. You can use the config policies to make it easy to set up public branches, so you don't have to ever type the full paths you want to merge from or into.
2. It checks to make sure the public branch last revision matches the local last revision so you are submitting what you think you are.
3. It uses the same public_branch and smtp sending settings as bzr-email, so if you have one set up, you have the other mostly set up.
4. Thunderbird refuses to not wrap lines, and request lines are usually pretty long (you have 2 long URLs in there).

Here are sample configuration settings for the PQM plugin. Here are the lines in bazaar.conf:

[DEFAULT]
email = Joe Smith <joe.smith@internode.on.net>
smtp_server=mail.internode.on.net:25

And here are the lines in locations.conf (or branch.conf for dirstate-tags branches):

[/home/joe/bzr/my-integration]
push_location = sftp://joe-smith@bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Ejoe-smith/bzr/my-integration/
push_location:policy = norecurse
public_branch = http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~joe-smith/bzr/my-integration/
public_branch:policy = appendpath
pqm_email = Bazaar PQM <pqm@bazaar-vcs.org>
pqm_branch = http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev

Note that the push settings will be added by the first push on a branch. Indeed the preferred way to generate the lines above is to use push with an argument, then copy-and-paste the other lines into the relevant file.

Submitting a Change

Here is one possible recipe once the above environment is set up:

1. pull bzr.dev => my-integration
2. merge patch => my-integration
3. fix up any final merge conflicts (NEWS being the big killer here).
4. commit
5. push
6. pqm-submit

Tracking Change Acceptance

The web interface to PQM is https://pqm.bazaar-vcs.org/. After submitting a change, you can visit this URL to confirm it was received and placed in PQM's queue.

When PQM completes processing a change, an email is sent to you with the results.

Blueprint Tracking Using Launchpad

New features typically require a fair amount of discussion, design and debate. For Bazaar, that information is often captured in a so-called "blueprint" on our Wiki. Overall tracking of blueprints and their status is done using Launchpad's relevant tracker, https://blueprints.launchpad.net/bzr/. Once a blueprint for ready for review, please announce it on the mailing list.

Alternatively, send an email begining with [RFC] with the proposal to the list. In some cases, you may wish to attach proposed code or a proposed developer document if that best communicates the idea. Debate can then proceed using the normal merge review processes.

Recording Blueprint Review Feedback

Unlike its Bug Tracker, Launchpad's Blueprint Tracker doesn't currently (Jun 2007) support a chronological list of comment responses. Review feedback can either be recorded on the Wiki hosting the blueprints or by using Launchpad's whiteboard feature.

Roadmaps

As the two senior developers, Martin Pool and Robert Collins coordinate the overall Bazaar product development roadmap. Core developers provide input and review into this, particularly during sprints. It's totally expected that community members ought to be working on things that interest them the most. The roadmap is valuable though because it provides context for understanding where the product is going as a whole and why.

Using Releases and Milestones in Launchpad

TODO ... (Exact policies still under discussion)

Bug Triage

Keeping on top of bugs reported is an important part of ongoing release planning. Everyone in the community is welcome and encouraged to raise bugs, confirm bugs raised by others, and nominate a priority. Practically though, a good percentage of bug triage is often done by the core developers, partially because of their depth of product knowledge.

With respect to bug triage, core developers are encouraged to play an active role with particular attention to the following tasks:

• keeping the number of unconfirmed bugs low
• ensuring the priorities are generally right (everything as critical - or medium - is meaningless)
• looking out for regressions and turning those around sooner rather than later.

Starting a Release

To start a new release cycle:

1. Send mail to the list with the key dates, who will be the release manager, and the main themes or targetted bugs. Ask people to nominate objectives, or point out an high-risk things that are best done early, or that interact with other changes.
2. Add a new "series" in Launchpad at <https://launchpad.net/bzr/+addseries>. There is one series for every x.y release.

Weekly Status Updates

TODO: Things to cover:

• Early communication to downstream teams (e.g. Launchpad) about changes in dependencies.
• Reminder re lifecycle and where we're up to right now
• Summary of recent successes and pending work
• Reminder re release objectives
• Reminder re things needing attention, e.g. bug triage, reviews, testing of certain things, etc.

Feature Freeze

TODO: Get material from http://bazaar-vcs.org/FeatureFreeze.

Making a Release or Release Candidate

This is the procedure for making a new bzr release:

1. If the release is the first candidate, make a new branch in PQM. (Contact RobertCollins for this step).

   Register the branch at https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+addbranch

2. Run the automatic test suite and any non-automated tests. (For example, try a download over http; these should eventually be scripted though not automatically run.). Try to have all optional dependencies installed so that there are no tests skipped. Also make sure that you have the c extensions compiled (make or python setup.py build_ext -i).

3. In the release branch, update version_info in ./bzrlib/__init__.py

4. Add the date and release number to ./NEWS.

5. Update the release number in the README. (It's not there as of 0.15, but please check).

6. Commit these changes to the release branch, using a command like:

   bzr commit -m "(jam) Release 0.12rc1."
   

   The diff before you commit will be something like:

   === modified file 'NEWS'
   --- NEWS        2006-10-23 13:11:17 +0000
   +++ NEWS        2006-10-23 22:50:50 +0000
   @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
   -IN DEVELOPMENT
   +bzr 0.12rc1  2006-10-23
   
      IMPROVEMENTS:
   
   
   === modified file 'bzrlib/__init__.py'
   --- bzrlib/__init__.py  2006-10-16 01:47:43 +0000
   +++ bzrlib/__init__.py  2006-10-23 22:49:46 +0000
   @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@
    # Python version 2.0 is (2, 0, 0, 'final', 0)."  Additionally we use a
    # releaselevel of 'dev' for unreleased under-development code.
   
   -version_info = (0, 12, 0, 'dev', 0)
   +version_info = (0, 12, 0, 'candidate', 1)
   
    if version_info[3] == 'final':
        version_string = '%d.%d.%d' % version_info[:3]
   

7. Submit those changes to PQM for merge into the appropriate release branch.

8. When PQM succeeds, pull down the master release branch.

9. Run make dist from a clean copy of the release branch; this will produce a tarball and prompt you to sign it.

10. Unpack the tarball into a temporary directory and run make check in that directory.

11. Run setup.py install --root=prefix to do a test install into your system directory, home directory, or some other prefix. Check the install worked and that the installed version is usable. (run the bzr script from the installed path with PYTHONPATH set to the site-packages directory it created). i.e.

    python setup.py install --root=installed
    PYTHONPATH=installed/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages installed/usr/bin/bzr
    

Publishing the release

Now you have the releasable product. The next step is making it available to the world.

1. In <https://launchpad.net/bzr/> click the "Release series" for this series, to take you to e.g. <https://launchpad.net/bzr/1.1>. Then click "Register a release", and add information about this release.

2. Within that release, upload the source tarball and the GPG signature.

   (These used to also be uploaded to <sftp://escudero.ubuntu.com/srv/bazaar.canonical.com/www/releases/src> but that's not accessible to all developers, and gets some mime types wrong... This upload can still be done with make dist-upload-escudero.)

3. Link from http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download to the tarball and signature.

4. Update http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/ to have a directory of documentation for this release. (Controlled by the update-bzr-docs script on escudero, and also update the latest symlink in /srv/bazaar.canonical.com/doc/.)

5. Announce on the Bazaar home page

Announcing the release

Now that the release is publicly available, tell people about it.

1. Announce to bazaar-announce and bazaar mailing lists. The announce mail will look something like this:

   Subject: bzr 0.11 release candidate 1

   
   

   INTRO HERE. Mention the release number and date, and why the release. (i.e. release candidate for testing, final release of a version, backport/bugfix etc).

   
   

   Tarballs:

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/src/bzr-VERSION.tar.gz

   and GPG signature:

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/src/bzr-VERSION.tar.gz.sig

   
   

   DESCRIBE-CHANGES-IN-OVERVIEW-HERE

   
   

   DESCRIBE-when the next release will be (if there is another - i.e. this is a release candidate)

   
   

   Many thanks to all the contributors to this release! I've included the

   contents of NEWS for VERSION below:

   To generate the data from NEWS, just copy and paste the relevant news section and clean it up as appropriate. The main clean-up task is to confirm that all major changes are indeed covered. This can be done by running bzr log back to the point when the branch was opened and cross checking the changes against the NEWS entries.

   (RC announcements should remind plugin maintainers to update their plugins.)

   • For point releases (i.e. a release candidate, or an incremental fix to a released version) take everything in the relevant NEWS secion : for 0.11rc2 take everything in NEWS from the bzr 0.11rc2 line to the bzr 0.11rc1 line further down.
   • For major releases (i.e. 0.11, 0.12 etc), take all the combined NEWS sections from within that version: for 0.11 take all of the 0.11 specific section, plus 0.11rc2, plus 0.11rc1 etc.

2. Update the news side menu -- this currently requires downloading the file, editing it, deleting it, and uploading a replacement.

3. Update the IRC channel topic. Use the /topic command to do this, ensuring the new topic text keeps the project name, web site link, etc.

4. Announce on http://freshmeat.net/projects/bzr/

   This should be done for both release candidates and final releases. If you do not have a Freshmeat account yet, ask one of the existing admins.

5. Update http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzr -- this should be done for final releases but not Release Candidates.

6. Package maintainers should update packages when they see the announcement.

7. Blog about it.

8. Post to http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-announce-list for major releases

9. Update the python package index: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bzr> - best done by running

   python setup.py register
   

   Remember to check the results afterwards.

Merging the released code back to trunk

Merge the release branch back into the trunk. Check that changes in NEWS were merged into the right sections. If it's not already done, advance the version number in bzr and bzrlib/__init__.py. Submit this back into pqm for bzr.dev.

Making Win32 installers

XXX: This information is now probably obsolete, as Alexander uploads direct to Launchpad. --mbp 20080116

Alexander Belchenko has been very good about getting packaged installers compiled (see Win32ReleaseChecklist for details). He generally e-mails John Arbash Meinel when they are ready. This is just a brief checklist of what needs to be done.

1. Download and verify the sha1 sums and gpg signatures. Frequently the sha1 files are in dos mode, and need to be converted to unix mode (strip off the trailing \r) before they veryify correctly.

2. Upload to the Launchpad page for this release.

3. Upload to escudero (to the b.c.c/www/releases/win32 directory) using sftp, lftp or rsync

4. Cat the contents of the .sha1 files into the SHA1SUM.

5. Update the SHA1SUM and MD5SUM files using something like md5sum bzr-0.14.0.win32.exe >> MD5SUM. Make sure you use append (>>) rather than overwrite (>).

6. Verify once again that everything is correct with sha1sum -c SHA1SUM and md5sum -c MD5SUM.

7. Update .htaccess so that the 'bzr-latest.win32.exe' links point to the latest release. This is not done for candidate releases, only for final releases. (example: bzr-0.14.0, but not bzr-0.14.0rc1).

8. Make sure these urls work as expected:

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/win32/bzr-latest.win32-py2.5.exe

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/win32/bzr-latest.win32-py2.5.exe.asc

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/win32/bzr-latest.win32-py2.4.exe

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/win32/bzr-latest.win32-py2.4.exe.asc

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/win32/bzr-setup-latest.exe

   http://bazaar-vcs.org/releases/win32/bzr-setup-latest.exe.asc

They should all try to download a file with the correct version number.

1. Update http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download to indicate the newly available versions.
2. Update http://bazaar-vcs.org/WindowsDownloads to have the correct version number as well as the correct sha1sum displayed.

The Bazaar PPA archive

We build Ubuntu .deb packages for Bazaar as an important part of the release process. These packages are hosted in a Personal Package Archive (PPA) on Launchpad, at <https://launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive>.

We build packages for every supported Ubuntu release <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases>. Packages need no longer be updated when the release passes end-of-life because all users should have then update.

The debian/ directory containing the packaging information is kept in branches on Launchpad, named like <https://code.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzrtools/packaging-dapper>

Updating the PPA for a new release

Preconditions for building these packages:

• You must have a Launchpad account and be a member of the ~bzr team

• You must have a GPG key registered to your Launchpad account.

• Configure dput to upload to our PPA with this section in your ~/.dput.cf:

  [bzr-ppa]
  fqdn = ppa.launchpad.net
  method = ftp
  incoming = ~bzr/ubuntu
  login = anonymous
  allow_unsigned_uploads = 0
  

• You need a Ubuntu (or probably Debian) machine, and

  sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts dput
  

Here is the process; there are some steps which should be automated in future:

1. You will need a working directory for each supported release, such as ~/bzr/Packaging/dapper

2. Download the official tarball of the release to e.g. ~/bzr/Releases

3. Copy the original tarball into your per-disto directory, then untar it and if necessary rename it:

   cp -l ~/bzr/Releases/bzrtools-1.3.0.tar.gz bzrtools_1.3.0.orig.tar.gz
   tar xfvz bzrtools_1.3.0.orig.tar.gz
   mv bzrtools bzrtools-1.3.0
   

4. Change into that directory and check out the packaging branch:

   cd bzrtools
   bzr checkout \
     bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzrtools/packaging-dapper \
     debian
   

5. For Bazaar plugins, change the debian/control file to express a dependency on the correct version of bzr.

   For bzrtools this is typically:

   Build-Depends-Indep: bzr (>= 1.3~), rsync
   Depends: ${python:Depends}, bzr (>= 1.3~), bzr (<< 1.4~), patch
   

6. Make a new debian/changelog entry for the new release, either by using dch or just editing the file:

   dch -v '1.3.0-1~bazaar1~dapper1' -D dapper
   

   dch will default to the distro you're working in and this isn't checked against the version number (which is just our conversion). So make sure to specify it.

   Make sure you have the correct email address for yourself, version number, and distribution. It should look something like this:

   > bzrtools (1.3.0-1~bazaar1~dapper1) dapper; urgency=low > > * New upstream release. > > -- Martin Pool <mbp@canonical.com> Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:36:27 +1100

   If you need to upload the package again to fix a problem, normally you should increment the last number in the version number, following the distro name. Make sure not to omit the initial -1, and make sure that the distro name in the version is consistent with the target name outside the parenthesis.

7. Commit these changes into the packaging branch:

   bzr ci -m '1.3.0-1~bazaar1~dapper1: New upstream release.' debian
   

8. Build a source package:

   debuild -S -sa -i
   

   This will create a .changes file in the per-distro directory, and should invoke gpg to sign it with your key. Check that file is reasonable: it should be uploading to the intended distribution, have a .orig file included, and the right version number.

9. Upload into the PPA:

   dput bzr-ppa ../bzrtools__1.3.0-1\~bazaar1\~dapper1_source.changes
   

   Don't forget the bzr-ppa component or dput will try to upload into the main archive by default. You can disable this by adding this section to your .dput.cf:

   [ubuntu]
   fqdn = SPECIFY.A.PPA.NAME
   

10. You should soon get an "upload accepted" mail from Launchpad, which means that your package is waiting to be built. You can then track its progress in <https://launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive> and <https://launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive/+builds>.