zest.releaser 4.0: major update

published May 22, 2015

zest.releaser has a fresh 4.0 release, with some nice improvements. So, what's new?

zest.releaser 4.0 has various improvements. We have better errors and warnings, did some cleanup, added little tricks, and have a recommended list of extra packages to use in combination with zest.releaser: check-manifest, pyroma, wheel, and twine.

Main improvements

Errors and warnings

We are better at showing errors. This is especially true for errors when uploading to PyPI. They were unintentionally swallowed before, so you did not notice when an upload failed. Oops, sorry about that.

Errors and warnings are more noticeable, because we colorize them. Errors are red, warnings are magenta. We use the colorama package for this.

We not only do this for lines that are printed explicitly by zest.releaser itself, but try to do this also for output from programs that we call, like check-manifest and python setup.py. This is a bit tricky though. Program should print standard messages to the standard output file and errors and warnings to the standard error file. Not all do that. So we might be missing some colors.

We allow retrying some commands when there is an error. Currently this is only done for commands that talk to PyPI or another package index. We ask the user if she wants to retry: Yes, no, quit. If for example PyPI upload fails because you have the wrong credentials in your ~/.pypirc, you can edit this file and tell zest.releaser to retry the command.

Cleanup

Python 2.6 is not officially supported anymore. It will probably still work, but we are no longer testing against it, so issues may start creeping in. This says nothing about the packages that are created: zest.releaser on Python 2.7 is still perfectly capable of creating distributions for older Python versions. Or for Python 3.

Sorry, zest.releaser itself does not run on Python 3. At least I have not tried it, and certainly the tests will be a pain to fix for both 2 and 3.

We have removed code for support of collective.sdist. That package was a backport from distutils for Python 2.5 and earlier, which we do not support.

Little tricks

We do not accept y or n as answer for a new version. I saw that with a few packages, which seems an obvious mistake.

When doing a postrelease, we add a always edit the changelog file to get a new version section with the text '- Nothing changed yet'. Now, when you do a prerelease and no real changelog entry has been added, so the text is still there, we warn and ask if you really want a new release. Probably you want to stop, check your version control history, and add one or more proper changelog entries.

zest.releaser makes commits in the prerelease and postrelease phase. Something like Preparing release 1.0 and Back to development: 1.1. You can add extra text to these messages by configuration in your setup.cfg or global ~/.pypirc.

One nice use case for this is telling Travis or Jenkins to skip Continuous Integration builds, like this:

[zest.releaser]
extra-message = [ci skip]

This depends on how your testing server is setup. It might not have this enabled, or it might be looking for a different message.

Of course, you can also add your favorite geeky quotes there:

[zest.releaser]
extra-message =
    No one expects the Spanish inquisition!
    So long and thanks for all the fish.