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+Decorator module
+=================
+
+The goal of the decorator module is to make it easy to define
+signature-preserving function decorators and decorator factories.
+It also includes an implementation of multiple dispatch and other niceties
+(please check the docs). It is released under a two-clauses
+BSD license, i.e. basically you can do whatever you want with it but I am not
+responsible.
+
+Installation
+-------------
+
+If you are lazy, just perform
+
+ `$ pip install decorator`
+
+which will install just the module on your system.
+
+If you prefer to install the full distribution from source, including
+the documentation, clone the `GitHub repo`_ or download the tarball_, unpack it and run
+
+ `$ pip install -e .`
+
+in the main directory, possibly as superuser.
+
+.. _tarball: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/decorator
+.. _GitHub repo: https://github.com/micheles/decorator
+
+Testing
+--------
+
+If you have the source code installation you can run the tests with
+
+ `$ python src/tests/test.py -v`
+
+or (if you have setuptools installed)
+
+ `$ python setup.py test`
+
+Notice that you may run into trouble if in your system there
+is an older version of the decorator module; in such a case remove the
+old version. It is safe even to copy the module `decorator.py` over
+an existing one, since we kept backward-compatibility for a long time.
+
+Repository
+---------------
+
+The project is hosted on GitHub. You can look at the source here:
+
+ https://github.com/micheles/decorator
+
+Documentation
+---------------
+
+The documentation has been moved to GitHub:
+http://micheles.github.io/decorator/index.md.
+From there you can get a nice PDF version by simply using the print
+functionality of your browser.
+
+For the impatient
+-----------------
+
+Here is an example of how to define a family of decorators tracing slow
+operations:
+
+```python
+from decorator import decorator
+
+@decorator
+def warn_slow(func, timelimit=60, *args, **kw):
+    t0 = time.time()
+    result = func(*args, **kw)
+    dt = time.time() - t0
+    if dt > timelimit:
+           logging.warn('%s took %d seconds', func.__name__, dt)
+       else:
+           logging.info('%s took %d seconds', func.__name__, dt)
+       return result
+
+@warn_slow  # warn if it takes more than 1 minute
+def preprocess_input_files(inputdir, tempdir):
+    ...
+
+@warn_slow(timelimit=600)  # warn if it takes more than 10 minutes
+def run_calculation(tempdir, outdir):
+    ...
+
+Enjoy!
+