[Python-Dev] query: docstring formatting in python distutils code

[Martin Geisler]

"C. Titus Brown" <ctb at msu.edu> writes:

> I guess docutils isn't in the stdlib (should it be?) or else we could
> modify 'help' to use it to prepare a straight text formatting.

We're using light-weight ReST markup in the Mercurial help texts and
transform it into straight text upon display in the terminal.

We want no external dependencies for Mercurial, so I wrote a "mini ReST"
parser in about 400 lines of code. It cheats a lot and can only handle
simple constructs... but maybe it would be interesting for Python's
help? You find it here:

  http://selenic.com/hg/file/tip/mercurial/minirst.py

Its test and the corresponding output shows the markup it can parse:

  http://selenic.com/hg/file/tip/tests/test-minirst.py
  http://selenic.com/hg/file/tip/tests/test-minirst.py.out

It would of course be much nicer to have Docutils in the standard
library. I'm not a Docutils developer, but to me it seems that Docutils
is now a very stable and widely used package, so it would IMHO make
sense to include it.

-- 
Martin Geisler

Mercurial links: http://mercurial.ch/
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