Thursday, September 05, 2013

PyDev 2.8.2 released. Plans for PyDev 3.

The latest PyDev release is out. Thank you to all supporters (https://sw-brainwy.rhcloud.com/supporters/PyDev/) which make it possible for me to keep working on PyDev!

Now, before giving more details on the release, let me outline the plans for PyDev 3:

Based on the feedback from my previous post, the plan will be moving forward with PyDev 3 to support only the latest Eclipse and Java versions (i.e.: Eclipse 3.8 and Eclipse 4.3 onwards and Java 7) . So, this release may mark the last release that supports older versions of Eclipse/Java. It's possible that there are more bugfix-only releases for the PyDev 2.x series, but only if some critical bug is found.

In practice: a development_pydev2 branch was created to provide for fixes that may be needed on PyDev 2, which is now in bugfix mode and the current development branch will now target PyDev 3.

Now related to the latest 2.8.2 release, lots of things came in, so, I'll try to keep the list short on what I think is nicest :)

  • Improved docstring support for sphinx/epydoc, so, you can have a different color to mark the related markup and code-completion can be requested to show sphinx markup on docstrings (as it already did for epydoc).
  • It's possible to use PEP-8 style imports (which is now the default on organize imports) and it's also possible to configure organize imports to remove unused imports -- personally, I think that's a bit dangerous, but it can be really handy sometimes :)
  • The project configuration got much nicer. As an example, it's possible to right click some folder to mark/unark it a source folder (i.e.: add/remove it from the PYTHONPATH).

There are many other changes too (see: http://pydev.org/ for details).