AsciiDoc Version 9

Installing and configuring the latest version of AsciiDoc across various distributions and platforms has never been easy and lots of contributors have put in lots of effort to do just this — this never ending and largely thankless task is the bane of the Open Source developer and user alike because invevitably distribution specific packages are either missing or are soon out of date.

But it doesn't have to be like this — AsciiDoc is a pure Python application and could be distributed from the Cheese Shop as a stand-alone platform independent Python Egg. The 9.x branch aims to attack this problem.

The feature plan for 9.0 is:

AsciiDoc easy_installable (done, not fully tested).
AsciiDoc as a Python module with a decent API (now a module, no API yet).
AsciiDoc 100% Python: no shell or unportable scripting (not done).

Later in the 9.x branch:

plugin system for frontend and backends.
plugin system for style-sheets.
distutils commands to produce AsciiDoc rendered documentation of Python packages (minimal support now in buildutils).

Yannick Gingras is the maintainer of the 9.x branch; he can be contacted by email or, preferably, on the mailing list.

There is no release of the 9.x branch yet but adventurous users can still get the source with Mercurial:

hg clone static-http://ygingras.net/files/asciidoc.hg asciidoc-9x

Using sources from the Mercurial repository will require Setuptools and the Mercurial plugin for Setuptools.

The 9.x branch is still experimental. You should install it inside a virtualenv to prevent damages to your global Python environment.