I noticed that some easy_installed packages don't seem to support online help in my environment at work (Solaris 10/x86, Python 2.4.2). Here's an example:

% python Python 2.4.2 (#1, Feb 23 2006, 12:48:31) [GCC 3.4.1] on sunos5 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import sqlalchemy >>> sqlalchemy.__file__ '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.3.3-py2.4.egg/sqlalchemy/__init__.pyc' >>> help(sqlalchemy) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? File "/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site.py", line 328, in __call__ return pydoc.help(*args, **kwds) File "/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/pydoc.py", line 1647, in __call__ self.help(request) File "/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/pydoc.py", line 1691, in help else: doc(request, 'Help on %s:') File "/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/pydoc.py", line 1475, in doc pager(title % desc + '\n\n' + text.document(object, name)) File "/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/pydoc.py", line 295, in document if inspect.ismodule(object): return self.docmodule(*args) File "/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/pydoc.py", line 1052, in docmodule for file in os.listdir(object.__path__[0]): OSError: [Errno 20] Not a directory: '/opt/app/g++lib6/python-2.4/lib/python2.4/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.3.3-py2.4.egg/sqlalchemy'

Online help for setuptools itself works fine though.

Is that a pydoc problem, a Python problem, an easy_install problem or what? I get the same result when I try to get help about Elixir.

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