Start the "contributing to boto" guide

Currently it just goes over how to setup a development environment, how to
run the tests, and how to generate the documentation.

docs/source/contributing.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,171 @@
+====================
+Contributing to Boto
+====================
+
+
+Setting Up a Development Environment
+====================================
+
+While not strictly required, it is highly recommended to do development
+in a virtualenv.  You can install virtualenv using pip::
+
+    $ pip install virtualenv
+
+Once the package is installed, you'll have a ``virtualenv`` command you can
+use to create a virtual environment::
+
+    $ virtualenv venv
+
+You can then activate the virtualenv::
+
+    $ . venv/bin/activate
+
+.. note::
+
+  You may also want to check out virtualenvwrapper_, which is a set of
+  extensions to virtualenv that makes it easy to manage multiple virtual
+  environments.
+
+A requirements.txt is included with boto which contains all the additional
+packages needed for boto development.  You can install these packages by
+running::
+
+    $ pip install -r requirements.txt
+
+
+Running the Tests
+=================
+
+All of the tests for boto are under the ``tests/`` directory. The tests for
+boto have been split into two main categories, unit and integration tests:
+
+* **unit** - These are tests that do not talk to any AWS services.  Anyone
+  should be able to run these tests without have any credentials
+  configured.  These are the types of tests that could be run in something
+  like a public CI server.  These tests tend to be fast.
+
+* **integration** - These are tests that will talk to AWS services, and
+  will typically require a boto config file with valid credentials.
+  Due to the nature of these tests, they tend to take a while to run.
+  Also keep in mind anyone who runs these tests will incur any usage
+  fees associated with the various AWS services.
+
+To run all the unit tests, run::
+
+    $ python tests/test.py tests/unit
+
+You should see output like this::
+
+    $ python tests/test.py tests/unit
+    ................................
+    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
+    Ran 32 tests in 0.075s
+
+    OK
+
+To run the integration tests, run::
+
+    $ python tests/test.py tests/integration
+
+Note that running the integration tests may take a while.
+
+Testing Details
+---------------
+
+The ``tests/test.py`` script is a lightweight wrapper around nose_. In
+general, you should be able to run ``nosetests`` directly instead of
+``tests/test.py``.  The ``tests/unit`` and ``tests/integration`` args
+in the commands above were referring to directories.  The command line
+arguments are forwarded to nose when you use ``tests/test.py``.  For example,
+you can run::
+
+    $ python tests/test.py -x -vv tests/unit/cloudformation
+
+And the ``-x -vv tests/unit/cloudformation`` are forwarded to nose.  See
+the nose_ docs for the supported command line options, or run
+``nosetests --help``.
+
+The only thing that ``tests/test.py`` does before invoking nose is to
+inject an argument that specifies that any testcase tagged with "notdefault"
+should not be run.  A testcase may be tagged with "notdefault" if the test
+author does not want everyone to run the tests.  In general, there shouldn't be
+many of these tests, but some reasons a test may be tagged "notdefault"
+include:
+
+* An integration test that requires specific credentials.
+* An interactive test (the S3 MFA tests require you to type in the S/N and
+  code).
+
+Tagging is done using nose's tagging_ plugin.  To summarize, you can tag a
+specific testcase by setting an attribute on the object.  Nose provides
+an ``attr`` decorator for convenience::
+
+    from nose.plugins.attrib import attr
+
+    @attr('notdefault')
+    def test_s3_mfs():
+        pass
+
+You can then run these tests be specifying::
+
+    nosetests -a 'notdefault'
+
+Or you can exclude any tests tagged with 'notdefault' by running::
+
+    nosetests -a '!notdefault'
+
+Conceptually, ``tests/test.py`` is injecting the "-a !notdefault" arg
+into nosetests.
+
+
+Testing Supported Python Versions
+==================================
+
+Boto supports python 2.6 and 2.7. An easy way to verify functionality
+across multiple python versions is to use tox_. A tox.ini file is included
+with boto.  You can run tox with no args and it will automatically test
+all supported python versions::
+
+    $ tox
+    GLOB sdist-make: boto/setup.py
+    py26 sdist-reinst: boto/.tox/dist/boto-2.4.1.zip
+    py26 runtests: commands[0]
+    ................................
+    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
+    Ran 32 tests in 0.089s
+
+    OK
+    py27 sdist-reinst: boto/.tox/dist/boto-2.4.1.zip
+    py27 runtests: commands[0]
+    ................................
+    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
+    Ran 32 tests in 0.087s
+
+    OK
+    ____ summary ____
+      py26: commands succeeded
+      py27: commands succeeded
+      congratulations :)
+
+
+Writing Documentation
+=====================
+
+The boto docs use sphinx_ to generate documentation.  All of the docs are
+located in the ``docs/`` directory.  To generate the html documentation, cd
+into the docs directory and run ``make html``::
+
+    $ cd docs
+    $ make html
+
+The generated documentation will be in the ``docs/build/html`` directory.
+The source for the documentation is located in ``docs/source`` directory,
+and uses `restructured text`_ for the markup language.
+
+
+.. _nose: http://readthedocs.org/docs/nose/en/latest/
+.. _tagging: http://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins/attrib.html
+.. _tox: http://tox.testrun.org/latest/
+.. _virtualenvwrapper: http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/virtualenvwrapper/
+.. _sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/
+.. _restructured text: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/rest.html

docs/source/index.rst

@@ -71,6 +71,7 @@ Additional Resources
 --------------------
 
 * :doc:`Boto Config Tutorial <boto_config_tut>`
+* :doc:`Contributing to Boto <contributing>`
 * `Boto Source Repository`_
 * `Boto Issue Tracker`_
 * `Boto Twitter`_