Bazaar Developer Guide (Proposed)

[Andrew Bennetts]

Ian Clatworthy wrote:
[...]
> the various Wiki pages covering related material into this. A first cut 
> at a Table of Contents can be found here: 
> http://bazaar-vcs.org/IanClatworthy/ProposedBazaarDeveloperGuide.

Having a "Using the Bazaar API" section would be valuable, but it does not
belong here.  The audience for an API guide is broader than just people working
on bzr proper, as it includes plugin authors and other users of bzrlib.  I'd
love to see it written, and linked from the Developer Guide (whatever form it
takes).  The Bazaar Developer Guide is about project policy and recommended ways
to work with the bzr code; an API guide is much more broadly applicable, so
deserves better visibility than being buried inside this guide.

"Cross Platform Guidelines" (which I nearly didn't see because I was looking for
the word "Portability", but that's probably just me...) should also consider the
python version as part of the platform.  So ideally it would include:

  * python 2.5+ features to avoid (because we want to work with python 2.4), and
  * how to write python 2.4 code that will work without warnings on 2.5 and
    above,

as well as the more obvious Linux vs. Windows vs. OS X issues.

-Andrew.