# Releases

## What is Releases?

Releases is a Python (2.7, 3.4+) compatible Sphinx (1.3+) extension designed to help you keep a source control friendly, merge friendly changelog file & turn it into useful, human readable HTML output.

Specifically:

- The source format (kept in your Sphinx tree as `changelog.rst`) is a stream-like timeline that plays well with source control & only requires one entry per change (even for changes that exist in multiple release lines).

- The output (when you have the extension installed and run your Sphinx build command) is a traditional looking changelog page with a section for every release; multi-release issues are copied automatically into each release.

- By default, feature and support issues are only displayed under feature releases, and bugs are only displayed under bugfix releases. This can be overridden on a per-issue basis.

Some background on why this tool was created can be found in this blog post.

For more documentation, please see http://releases.readthedocs.io.

Note

You can install the development version via `pip install -e git+https://github.com/bitprophet/releases/#egg=releases`.

## Table of Contents

- Concepts
  - Issue and release types
  - Release organization
  - Major releases
  - “Unstable prehistory” mode
- Usage
  - Optional styling additions
- Changelog