Removing some ignores that are not relevant to astropy_helpers
Adding the most recent ez_setup.py and the setuptools_boostrap script from Astropy
Start an astropy_helpers package and initialize it wieht the setup_helpers and version_helpers modules from astropy; these are still heavily reliant on Astropy to work
Removed most requirements for astropy itself in the setup_helpers module, mainly by copying over a few utility functions (some of these utilities are no longer used in astropy as a result--should we remove them?)  Also removed any support for the astropy test and configuration frameworks, but that can be added back in later as needed...
Split the git utils from version_helpers out into their own git_helpers module.  This enabled creating a version of generate_version_py that can work without having Astropy or any other support libraries installed, and that also provides support for projects that don't use git (though they lose revision numbers in their version strings until and unless we add support for other VCS (I do already have code to do this for SVN and HG should we wish to add it)).
Add a stub of a setup.py and a MANIFEST.in
Restore missing imports
Updated this error string; though this function will likely be removed at some point.
Add a helpers function for getting info out of the package's .version module; previously this was returning the version module in astropy_helpers itself.  This changes the get_debug_option function such that it requires the package name.  Will probably refactor functions like that into a class that is already instatiated with basic info about the package being built, such as its name.
Removing the last vestiges of the astropy config system for now, as it won't work with astropy_helpers in its current state.  This can, and should be revisited once we have a better idea of what we're going to do about configuration.
Since setuptools and PyPI 'canonicalize' underscores to dashes might as well just used the dashed name explcitly
Two improvements to the silence context manager: If an exception occurs in the body of the with statement, restore sys.stdout/err so that the exception is displayed properly.  Also add a dummy flush method to _DummyFile as there is some code in distutils that calls sys.stdout.flush
Initial version of the ah_bootstrap.py script (name tentative).  This works similarly to setuptool' ez_setup.py in how it tries several different routes to find the astropy_helpers module and get it on sys.path.  The default is to just import it from a submodule called astropy_helpers--this is the default that will be used when running the astropy repo, for example.  But there are many other options.  I've tested out all the major use cases, but once I add a test suite to astropy_helpers it will be nice to have tests for the boostrap script as well.
Should be version_info
Fix typo
Only output an error warning if git submodule had a non-zero exit status.  It appears that in some versions of git even a successful run can output some text to stderr; see https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/1563#issuecomment-37675210
Combine setuptools_bootstrap into ah_bootstrap so as to reduce the number of needed 'bootstrap' scripts :)
Fix a bug in get_git_devstr--I think the old default functionality of using __file__ may have made sense when this was used primarily by Astropy itself, but in the context of an affiliated package it makes no sense.
added astropy_helpers branch of package-template as a submodule in astropy_helpers.tests--this will allow us to use the package template itself as our test project for testing astropy_helpers :)
Make astropy_helpers.tests into a proper subpackage, but exclude it from sdists to keep those small.  Running the astropy_helpers tests should be of interest to developers only for now.  Also make sure the testpackage isn't recursed into for py.test since we don't want to run *its* tests