astropy-helpers 0.4rc1

Utilities for building and installing Astropy, Astropy affiliated packages, and their respective documentation.

This project provides a Python package, astropy_helpers, which includes many build, installation, and documentation-related tools used by the Astropy project, but packaged separately for use by other projects that wish to leverage this work. There is a draft Astropy Proposal for Enhancement dubbed APE 4 describing the motivation behind this package and details of its implementation. Acceptance of APE 4 is pending only on hammering out minor details prior to the release of Astropy v0.4.

This also includes a special “bootstrap” module called ah_bootstrap.py which is intended to be used by a project’s setup.py in order to ensure that the astropy_helpers package is available for build/installation. This is similar to the ez_setup.py module that is shipped with some projects to bootstrap setuptools.

This preview release of astropy-helpers is intended for testing installation via PyPI prior to the final initial release which will be astropy-helpers v0.4. The version of the initial release was chosen, in this case, to parallel Astropy v0.4, which will be the first version of Astropy to use astropy-helpers. As described in APE 4, the major/minor version of astropy-helpers will be kept parallel with the latest version of Astropy, though the micro (bugfix) version will be allowed to diverge.

More details will be added to this README before astropy-helpers v0.4 final is released. In the meantime, see the setup.py and setup.cfg files in the Affiliated package template for examples of its usage.