Paver 0.7: Better than distutils, better docs and much more

I’m delighted to release Paver 0.7. If you missed my original announcement, the short story is that Paver is a new build, distribution and deployment scripting tool geared toward Python projects. My original announcement and the new foreword to the docs explain the motivation.

Ben Bangert and others pointed out a giant documentation bug in 0.4: there was a fair bit of reference doc but no doc that said “here’s how you get started with Paver”. Now there is: Paver’s Getting Started Guide.

Paver 0.7 is a big step up from 0.4 (hence the version number bump). I implemented one of the two major features I had planned for 1.0: distutils/setuptools integration. It’s really cool. Have you ever wanted to just slightly change how “sdist” or “upload” or “develop” worked? Now you can, just by writing a function in your pavement.py file. And don’t worry, you don’t need to duplicate anything between setup.py and pavement.py. It all just moves into pavement.py and Paver can even generate a setup.py file for you, since most people are use to the common “python setup.py install” command.

I’ve gone even farther than that with making it easy to use Paver and not annoy users that don’t yet have Paver. Paver can create a small zip file of Paver’s core bits so that “python setup.py install” will work just fine even for users who don’t have Paver installed. Paver can also create a virtualenv bootstrap script for you, so that users don’t necessarily need to install your package on their systems in order to use it.

Paver’s got new documentation tools that work great with Sphinx. It’s now easy to mark sections of sample code files and then include those sections in your documentation, using the built-in version of Ned Batchelder’s Cog.

And I’m definitely eating my own dogfood. Paver is built using Paver itself and the source distribution includes the paver-minilib so that setup.py install should work fine (let me know if it doesn’t!) The new Getting Started Guide uses the new documentation tools.

There are even more changes than these, and you can look at the changelog for the full list. Note that if you’re using Paver 0.4, there are a couple of trivial breaking changes.