I'm highly interested in cookiecutter template inheritance.

It doesn't seems complicated to implement, and I might try it soon.

My first reflection is that it requires to change some core principle, although they are implementable while keeping backward compatibility.

• use of YAML in cookiecutter.yml, adds a inherit keyword, allowance for multiple inherited value
  doesn't seem difficult to handle:

    inherit:
      cookiecutter-py: https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-py
    context:
        ...

• the name of the main template directory should not be managed as it is today. It should be a fixed name (like say 'src') and the final name of the actual created directory should be given by other means (config file probably.
  • Why ?
    • (unrelated) the current way of detecting this directory is clunky to say the least, and without good justification it seems.
    • In some ways, allowing to set the name from the template dir is somewhat awkwards, and as a result nearly every body don't use that feature and ends up with a {{cookiecutter.repo_name}} or something equivalent. As a user, I might want to specify my target directory name at the CLI level also. Today, the 'repo_name' feels that it should be a command line argument more than queried variable for more than one reason (you don't need to set it per default in your config file for instance).
    • To support inheritance, for instance, you want your 'cookiecutter-python' project to define a generic set of file. But how to name your root dir ? Your 'cookiecutter-django' template will want to override this name with 'django-{{name}}'.

Thank you for your great work on cookiecutter. Don't be offensed by my reflections. And please consider giving me a feedback on how do you feel about these ideas.