Blue Sky On Mars

Paver, the project scripting tool for Python, has just moved to GitHub thanks to Almad. Almad has stepped forward and offered to properly bring Paver into the second decade of the 21st century (doesn’t have the same ring to it as bringing something into the 21st century, does it?

Seriously, though, Paver reached the point where it was good enough for me and did what I wanted (and, apparently, a good number of other people wanted as well). Almad has some thoughts and where the project should go next and I’m looking forward to hearing more about them. Sign up for the googlegroup to see where Paver is going next.

Paver is a Python project scripting tool that I initially created in 2007 to automate a whole bunch of tasks around projects that I was working on. It knows about setuptools and distutils, it has some ideas on handling documentation with example code. It also has users who occasionally like to send in patches. The latest release has had more than 3700 downloads on PyPI.

Paver hasn’t needed a lot of work, because it does what it says on the tin: helps you automate project tasks. Sure, there’s always more that one could do. But, there isn’t more that’s required for it to be a useful tool, day-to-day.

Here’s the point of my post: Paver is in danger of being abandoned. At this point, everything significant that I am doing is in JavaScript, not Python. The email and patch traffic is low, but it’s still too much for someone that’s not even actively using the tool any more.

If you’re a Paver user and either:

1. want to take the project in fanciful new directions or,

2. want to keep the project humming along with a new .x release every now and then

please let me know.