"Vibrissae (singular: vibrissa), or whiskers, are specialized hairs (or, in certain bird species, specialized feathers) usually employed for tactile sensation." - Wikipedia
Whiskers is a Pyramid application for storing information about your buildouts. It is intended to use with buildout.sendpickedversions (PyPI, Github) extension.
Why? Shortly to automate your workflow.
Think an environment where you're managing tens or hundereds of buildouts - say Plone instances. Most of them have probably almost the same packages and versions. Now you make an critical fix to some custom package and you need to know which buildouts you have to update. Whiskers helps you here by knowing what is required and where.
Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.3
virtualenv --no-site-packages -p /path/to/python whiskers cd whiskers bin/pip install whiskers wget https://github.com/pingviini/whiskers/raw/master/production.ini bin/pserve production.ini
virtualenv --no-site-packages -p /path/to/python whiskers git clone git://github.com/pingviini/whiskers.git cd whiskers python setup.py install bin/pserve production.ini
To get some data to Whiskers you should set up buildout.sendpickedversions for your buildouts. Just add following lines to your buildout.cfg:
[buildout] extensions = buildout.sendpickedversions send-data-url = http://localhost:6543 ...
Above configuration assumes you have Whiskers running on localhost.
Run buildout and it should say in last lines something like this:
... root: Sending data to remote url (http://localhost:6543/) Added buildout information to Whiskers.
Open web browser and go to http://localhost:6543/buildouts and you should see your buildout data.
Both Whiskers and buildout.sendpickedversions have been updated to work nicely together. Make sure you are using latest version of buildout.sendpickedversions when you've set up Whiskers 1.x.
Older version of buildout.sendpickedversions (0.x) is incompatible with Whiskers 1.x. Same goes to other way too - Whiskers 0.x doesn't work with buildout.sendpickedversions 1.x.
Please kill it (or add a new issue to github). Code is out there for you.
Seriously - I'm more than willing accepting new contributions.