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 link:downloads.html#X1[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distribution specific packages are either missing or are soon out of
date.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
http://pypi.python.org/[Cheese Shop] as a stand-alone platform
independent http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs[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).

http://ygingras.net[Yannick Gingras] is the maintainer of the 9.x branch;
he can be contacted by mailto:ygingras@ygingras.net[email] or, preferably,
on the link:support.html[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
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools[Setuptools] and the
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/hg.setuptools/[Mercurial plugin] for
Setuptools.

NOTE: The 9.x branch is still experimental.  You should install it
inside a http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv/[virtualenv] to
prevent damages to your global Python environment.
