This version contains mostly bug fixes and robustness improvements in a variety of areas, ranging from improved web spidering to better handling of spaces in the Windows directory names for generated .exe files. The biggest new feature included, however, is system packager support including improved bdist_* command handling, and support for installing projects in a "single version, externally managed" format. You can now also build RPMs and Windows installers of setuptools-baseds project without any special steps, even if the project uses egg metadata.
The other new features are for developers of setuptools-based projects, and mostly have to do with improved handling of source distribution manifest generation and specifying package data to be included in a project. You can now simply specify "include_package_data=True" and any file under revision control or listed in your source manifest (or MANIFEST.in) will be installed as part of the package. There is also an 'exclude_package_data' option that can be used to trim back the list, and the 'package_data' option can still be used to add files that aren't in revision control or the source manifest. Finally, there have been many documentation updates, including an overhaul of the installation instructions and a new "What your users should know" section of the setuptools manual for project developers. The next release of setuptools will be 0.6a10, for which I plan to add shared library building support (it's needed for an OSAF project, PyICU). There are also some minor features (like dependency_links) that didn't make it into 0.6a9 but which aren't big enough to need waiting till 0.7. Special thanks to Kevin Dangoor, Ian Bicking, and everyone else who reported bugs or helped track them down. Thanks to your participation, 0.6a9 is in much better shape than 0.6a8, and I look forward to a great 0.6a10! _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
