shrinkwrap: Python packaging for everything
===========================================

Shrinkwrap provides tools to create lightweight Python package
wrappers around non-Python software, and to install such software from
project-specific repositories using virtualenv and pip.

A shrinkwrap package is a minimal python package that downloads,
compiles and installs software to the virtualenv base directory.  The
shrinkwrap package behaves just like a regular python package, so both
shrinkwrap and non-shrinkwrap packages can be dependencies of each
other.  We find that this greatly simplifies deployment of Python
packages that depend on compiled libraries *without* requiring the use
of system-wide packaging tools, like apt or yum.  Shrinkwrap is
**not** an API wrapper generator like `SWIG <http://www.swig.org/>`_,
but does make it easier to install C libraries into a virtualenv
before installing a separate Python wrapper around its API.

Full documentation can be found at ReadTheDocs:

     http://shrinkwrap.rtfd.org

