Version 2.4 of muddle is released

The main changes are below the cut.

There is a new command "muddle distribute", which allows distribution of muddle build trees, for making a source or binary release, for GPL license compliance, and so on. To support this, there is new funcitonality in muddle to specify distributions, and to specify the licensing of checkouts and packages. All of this is documented in the user manual, and in "muddle help distribute".

Note that "muddle distribute" and the distribution and license functions may still change slightly as actual use reveals any raw edges.

There is also new support for upstream repositories, with corresponding new commands "muddle push-upstream" and "muddle pull-upstream". This allows one to name upstream (or remote) repositories and use them, as is commonly done with Linux.

There are also a variety of other changes:

• Better exception handling when an error occurs in a build description, especially in subdomain build descriptions - basically, not showing tracebacks of uninteresting parts of the muddle infrastructure.
• The help categories have been changed slightly, so "muddle help categories" can take account of "muddle distribute".
• "muddle help" doesn't fail when checking the column width if output is not to a terminal.
• The "muddled.depend" module provides new convenience functions "checkout", "package" and "deployment" for creating labels - for instance, "checkout('fred')".
• Various internal fixes have been made.

As ever,  the muddle documentation at ReadTheDocs has been automatically updated. There are new sections on:

• Repositories (and in particular, upstream repositories and how to use them)
• Distributions and licenses
• How instruction files are written

and don't forget the "not very frequently asked quesstions" in the Jottings section.