shipper 1.7 is released

I’ve released shipper 1.7. The main new feature in this release id that it now knows how to play nice with repository collections managed by gitolite and browseable through gitweb, like this one.

What’s new is that shipper (described in detail here shortly before I shipped the 1.0 version) now treats a gitolite/gitweb colection as just another publishing channel. When you call shipper to announce an update on a project in the collection, it updates the ‘description’ and ‘README.html’ files in the repository from the project control file, thus ensuring that the gitweb view of the collection always displays up-to-date metadata.

This is yet more fallout from the impending Gitorious shutdown. I don’t know if my refugee projects from Gitorious will be hosted on thyrsus.com indefinitely; I’m considering several alternatives. But while they’re there I might as well figure out how to make updates as easy as possible so nobody else has to solve this problem and everyone’s productivity can go up.

Actually, I’m a little surprised that I have received neither bug reports nor feature requests on shipper since issuing the beta in 2013. This hints that either the software is perfect (highly unlikely) or nobody else has the problem it solves – that is, having to ship releases of software so frequently that one must either automate the process details or go mad.

Is that really true? Am I the only hacker with this problem? Or is there something I’m missing here? An enquiring mind wants to know.