Astropy-helpers

------------------

- Fixed git revision count on systems with git versions older than v1.7.2.
[70]

- Fixed display of warning text when running a git command fails (previously
the output of stderr was not being decoded properly). [70]

- The ``--offline`` flag to ``setup.py`` understood by ``ah_bootstrap.py``
now also prevents git from going online to fetch submodule updates. [67]

- The Sphinx extension for converting issue numbers to links in the changelog
now supports working on arbitrary pages via a new ``conf.py`` setting:
``changelog_links_docpattern``. By default it affects the ``changelog``
and ``whatsnew`` pages in one's Sphinx docs. [61]

- Fixed crash that could result from users with missing/misconfigured
locale settings. [58]

- The font used for code examples in the docs is now the
system-defined ``monospace`` font, rather than ``Minaco``, which is
not available on all platforms. [50]

----------------

- Initial release of astropy-helpers. See `APE4
<https://github.com/astropy/astropy-APEs/blob/master/APE4.rst>`_ for
details of the motivation and design of this package.

- The ``astropy_helpers`` package replaces the following modules in the
``astropy`` package:

- ``astropy.setup_helpers`` -> ``astropy_helpers.setup_helpers``

- ``astropy.version_helpers`` -> ``astropy_helpers.version_helpers``

- ``astropy.sphinx`` - > ``astropy_helpers.sphinx``

These modules should be considered deprecated in ``astropy``, and any new,
non-critical changes to those modules will be made in ``astropy_helpers``
instead. Affiliated packages wishing to make use those modules (as in the
Astropy package-template) should use the versions from ``astropy_helpers``
instead, and include the ``ah_bootstrap.py`` script in their project, for
bootstrapping the ``astropy_helpers`` package in their setup.py script.