===================
Documenting Changes
===================

When you change bzr, please update the relevant documentation for the
change you made:

Changing existing behavior
  If the change will break existing command lines, or break
  interoperability with other versions of Bazaar, mention this in 
  "External Compatibility Breaks" in NEWS, and also in "What's New".

Adding a new feature, function or option
  Describe this in NEWS, in the user guide, and in the "What's New"
  document.  Consider whether you should also update command help
  or any help topics.

A new hook or extension point
  These are also described in NEWS, in the hook documentation, and in
  "What's New."  Even though they might be API-only changes, the fact that 
  they exist may interest users enough to write a new plugin that uses
  them.

Fixing a bug
  If the bug has any user-visible impact, describe it in the NEWS file
  in such a way that users can tell whether the problem they're
  experiencing is the one that was fixed.

Improving performance
  Mention this under "improvements" in NEWS, and if it's a notable
  improvement mention it in "What's New".

Deprecating an API, or adding a new recommended API
  Mention this in the "API Changes" of NEWS, if it's likely to affect
  plugin authors.  Consider whether you should also update the developer
  documentation.

Changing the way the test suite works or adding more tests
  Mention this under "Testing" in NEWS, and update the developer guide
  to testing.

Purely internal changes
  If the change has no user-visible impact and is not interesting to 
  plugin developers, it doesn't need to be mentioned in NEWS.  If you're 
  setting a new pattern or adding a new abstraction, update the developer
  docs.

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, including fixed documentation bugs

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.

To help with merging, NEWS entries should be sorted lexicographically
within each section.

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.

.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
.. _epydoc: http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/
