]ANN[ Vellum 0.16: Lots Of Documentation and Watching

[Zed A. Shaw]

Hi Everyone,

Just putting out an announcement that I've released a new version of
Vellum numbered 0.16.  This version should be ready for people to use
as not much of the internal structure has changed in a great many
commits and it contains all the latest bug fixes.

It also has the beginning of an extensive PDF document describing how
to use it.  This is still an in-progress work, so it has grammar
mistakes and spelling errors, but it does show off some nice
documentation wizardy I'm experimenting with in LaTeX.

Finally there's a new "watch" feature which is very handy described
further down.  It simply watches a file and reruns your targets when
the file changes.


GETTING IT

Honestly, the easiest way is just:

  sudo easy_install zapps vellum

If you want to build the book yourself and have all of TeX Live
installed then you'd also need:

  sudo easy_install pygments idiopidae

You can also hit the http://launchpad.net/vellum/ page to grab source
tarballs and other goodies.


THE BOOK OF VELLUM

You can grab the most recent draft of the book at:

  http://zedshaw.com/projects/vellum/manual-final.pdf

Any corrections or comments on how it is written are more than
welcome.  Suggestions for improving the TeX are also helpful since I'm
not a TeX expert yet.

The software I'm using to build that book is fully available to anyone
looking to document their projects.  You can grab Idiopidae, Pygments,
and TeX from the interwebs.  You can then grab the whole source and all
the LaTeX goodness from my Bazaar repository:

  bzr pull http://zedshaw.com/repository/vellum/

Look in the doc/ directory for all the fun.  You'll notice that
the .tex files have *no* code in them, and that it's all imported by
Idiopidae.  Look at the doc/book.vel file to see how it's all merged
and massaged together, and you can reuse this book.vel file to start
your own books.


CRAZY NICE WATCH FEATURE

I added a feature to Vellum that is one of those "duh" features.  You
can tell Vellum to watch a file, and if it changes Vellum will rerun
some targets.  When I work on the manual.tex file, I do this:

  vellum -w doc/manual.tex book.draft book.view

It just keeps looping, and if you hit CTRL-C you can force a build with
ENTER or quit with CTRL-C.  Then I use the evince PDF viewer under
linux, which has similar Vim key bindings and reloads the PDF when it
changes.

The net effect of this is, whenever I change my manual.tex file, Vellum
runs my build for the manual and evince redisplays it for me to see.

You could use this simple feature to also continually run unit tests
whenever a file changes that you are working on.

GPLv3?

How do people feel about Vellum's GPLv3 status?  It actually doesn't
impact anyone unless you embed Vellum into a project/product or you
create commands (which you should give back anyway).  Even then if you
never release your build to your users then you don't need to release
the commands.

However, I'm curious to get other people's thoughts.

Thanks a bunch folks.

-- 
Zed A. Shaw
- Hate: http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
- Good: http://www.zedshaw.com/
- Evil: http://yearofevil.com/