At 12:11 PM 6/14/2006 +0200, Jens Engel wrote:

Hello,

PythonEggs seem to have a problem access the docstring of the root package. Note that there is no problem accessing docstrings of contained modules and packages with Python's help().

The pydoc module (which implements the help() function) doesn't support zip files when listing the contents of a package. (That is, it's not the docstring that there's a problem with, it's help() trying to list the modules from the package.) This is a Python bug that is fixed in Python 2.5. I plan to release a hotfix package for older versions of Python that fixes the bug. In the meantime, you can work around it by using the --always-unzip option when easy_install-ing a package; the package will then be installed as a directory instead of a zipfile. But be sure you need it, because egg directories slow down startup and importing much more than zipfiles do. Alternatively, you can just grab the Python 2.5 version of the pydoc and pkgutil modules and drop them on your PYTHONPATH ahead of the standard library versions. (The 2.5 version of pydoc uses utilities in pkgutil to access packages' module lists.)