Recommended approach for loading CouchDB design documents in Python?

I'm very new to couch, but I'm trying to use it on a new Python project, and I'd like to use python to write the design documents (views), also. I've already configured Couch to use the couchpy view server, and I can confirm this works by entering some simple map/reduce functions into Futon.

Are there any official recommendations on how to load/synchronize design documents when using Python's couchdb module?

I understand that I can post design documents to "install" them into Couch, but my question is really around best practices. I need some kind of strategy for deploying, both in development environments and in production environments. My intuition is to create a directory and store all of my design documents there, then write some kind of sync script that will upload each one into couch (probably just blindly overwriting what's already there). Is this a good idea?

The documentation for "Writing views in Python" is 5 sentences, and really just explains how to install couchpy. On the project's google code site, there is mention of a couchdb.design module that sounds like it might help, but there's no documentation (that I can find). The source code for that module indicates that it does most of what I'm interested in, but it stops short of actually loading files. I think I should do some kind of module discovery, but I've heard that's non-Pythonic. Advice?

Edit:

In particular, the idea of storing my map/reduce functions inside string literals seems completely hacky. I'd like to write real python code, in a real module, in a real package, with real unit tests. Periodically, I'd like to synchronize my "couch views" package with a couchdb instance.

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