Notes for astropy-helpers contributors

Warning

Note that astropy-helpers is deprecated. As justified and described in APE17, the astropy-helpers infrastructure is no longer used for Astropy coordinated or infrastructure packages, and hence is no longer maintained.

Note about versions

As described in APE4, the version numbers for astropy-helpers follow the corresponding major/minor version of the astropy core package, but with an independent sequence of micro (bugfix) version numbers. Hence, the initial release is 0.4, in parallel with Astropy v0.4, which will be the first version of Astropy to use astropy-helpers.

Trying out changes

If you contribute a change to astropy-helpers and want to try it out with a package that already uses astropy-helpers, install astropy-helpers from your branch of the repository in editable mode:

pip install -e .

Then go to your package and add the --use-system-astropy-helpers for any setup.py command you want to check, e.g.:

python setup.py build_docs --use-system-astropy-helpers

This will cause the installed version to be used instead of any local submodule.