pbr/doc/source/user/features.rst

Features

Version

Versions can be managed two ways - postversioning and preversioning. Postversioning is the default, and preversioning is enabled by setting version in the setup.cfg metadata section. In both cases version strings are inferred from git.

If the currently checked out revision is tagged, that tag is used as the version.

If the currently checked out revision is not tagged, then we take the last tagged version number and increment it to get a minimum target version.

We then walk git history back to the last release. Within each commit we look for a Sem-Ver: pseudo header, and if found parse it looking for keywords. Unknown symbols are not an error (so that folk can't wedge pbr or break their tree), but we will emit an info level warning message. Known symbols: feature, api-break, deprecation, bugfix. A missing Sem-Ver line is equivalent to Sem-Ver: bugfix. The bugfix symbol causes a patch level increment to the version. The feature and deprecation symbols cause a minor version increment. The api-break symbol causes a major version increment.

If postversioning is in use, we use the resulting version number as the target version.

If preversioning is in use we check that the version set in the metadata section of setup.cfg is greater than the version we infer using the above method. If the inferred version is greater than the preversioning value we raise an error, otherwise we use the version from setup.cfg as the target.

We then generate dev version strings based on the commits since the last release and include the current git sha to disambiguate multiple dev versions with the same number of commits since the release.

Note

pbr expects git tags to be signed for use in calculating versions

The versions are expected to be compliant with semver.

The version.SemanticVersion class can be used to query versions of a package and present it in various forms - debian_version(), release_string(), rpm_string(), version_string(), or version_tuple().

AUTHORS and ChangeLog

Why keep an AUTHORS or a ChangeLog file when git already has all of the information you need? AUTHORS generation supports filtering/combining based on a standard .mailmap file.

Manifest

Just like AUTHORS and ChangeLog, why keep a list of files you wish to include when you can find many of these in git. MANIFEST.in generation ensures almost all files stored in git, with the exception of .gitignore, .gitreview and .pyc files, are automatically included in your distribution. In addition, the generated AUTHORS and ChangeLog files are also included. In many cases, this removes the need for an explicit 'MANIFEST.in' file

Sphinx Autodoc

Sphinx can produce auto documentation indexes based on signatures and docstrings of your project but you have to give it index files to tell it to autodoc each module: that's kind of repetitive and boring. PBR will scan your project, find all of your modules, and generate all of the stub files for you.

Sphinx documentation setups are altered to generate man pages by default. They also have several pieces of information that are known to setup.py injected into the sphinx config.

See the pbr section for details on configuring your project for autodoc.

Requirements

You may not have noticed, but there are differences in how pip requirements.txt files work and how distutils wants to be told about requirements. The pip way is nicer because it sure does make it easier to populate a virtualenv for testing or to just install everything you need. Duplicating the information, though, is super lame. To solve this issue, pbr will let you use requirements.txt-format files to describe the requirements for your project and will then parse these files, split them up appropriately, and inject them into the install_requires, tests_require and/or dependency_links arguments to setup. Voila!

You can also have a requirement file for each specific major version of Python. If you want to have a different package list for Python 3 then just drop a requirements-py3.txt and it will be used instead.

Finally, it is possible to specify groups of optional dependencies, or "extra" requirements, in your setup.cfg rather than setup.py.

long_description

There is no need to maintain two long descriptions- and your README file is probably a good long_description. So we'll just inject the contents of your README.rst, README.txt or README file into your empty long_description. Yay for you.