Developers can use zc.buildout to manage the build of a software project. It is most commonly used in the Zope and Plone world, but has been gaining traction in other communities like Django.

One of the nice things about buildout is the ability to define the configuration via ini style files. You can extend a local file or a URL. In version 1.4.0 of buildout, the option to cache the URL locally was added along with the new download API.

Here is an example: >

[buildout]
versions = versions
extends = 
   http://dist.example.org/versions.cfg
   versions.cfg

This allows you to pull in a list of versions from example.org. If you have your default.cfg setup to cache the URL then you could find that file manually. This requires that you know the md5 hash of the URL string. Not the most convenient way to find the file. This is where the plugin comes in handy.

The plugin allows you to use the current line, a visual selection or a string passed in to get the contents of the extended URL using the :RevealExtends command.

See the included docs for more information.

Python support is required for retrieving the URL from the internet if it can't be found in the cache.

See the code on github: http://github.com/claytron/RevealExtends