Mailman 3 June 2006 - Doc-SIG

First draft of Functional HOWTO
by A.M. Kuchling July 1, 2006

July 1, 2006

I've finally completed a first draft of a Functional Programming HOWTO that discusses the language feature and modules that are useful in functional-style programs. The draft is at <http://www.amk.ca/python/writing/functional>; this won't be its permanent home, because once it's done it'll go in Doc/howto/ in the distribution. I'd greatly appreciate comments on it. It still feels somehow incomplete, like more of the general material is needed, but I'm not sure what to add. I wrote a small but nontrivial functional program as an example -- it's in sandbox/Doc in SVN -- but I'm not sure dissecting an example is very useful. The resulting section would be fairly long, and I haven't come up with an example that exercises every single feature (e.g. most of the \ functions in the itertools module). A more minor issue: perhaps the HOWTO should describe genexps in detail, and mention listcomps as an aside; this would be the oppposite of how it's currently organized. Thoughts? --amk

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[Announce] haddoc and haddoc.el
by Martin Blais June 21, 2006

June 21, 2006

Description =========== Haddoc is a simple tool that allows an emacs user to search the Python HTML documentation indexes and to bring a web browser to an index term page. Motivation ---------- Even though I have the Python TexInfo documentation installed from my Emacs, somehow I always end up browsing the documentation from a web browser. Most of the time I start from either the Python Library Reference or from the index. I wanted to be able to bring up the documentation from within Emacs. This does it. With haddoc, you invoke the elisp function ``haddoc-lookup`` (I type ``C-c .``), enter some search terms, and the matches from the Python indexes are shown in a buffer, from which you can select to direct your external web browser to. I like to drive an external Firefox with it. Design ------ I took the simple approach and wrote a combination of Emacs-LISP and Python code to implement this: * ``haddoc-update``: a Python script that will parse the HTML documentation indexes and generate a mapping of the index entries to the HTML pages in a DBM database (in ``/var/lib/haddoc/haddoc.db`` by default) * ``haddoc-lookup``: a Python script that does a lookup of search terms (potentially incomplete) on the index keys and returns the page references for each of the search terms on stdout * ``haddoc.el``: an Emacs-LISP package that can query the results of ``haddoc-lookup`` and spawn a webbrowser to the appropriate pages. Download at: http://furius.ca/downloads/haddoc/releases/ Cheers,

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Problem with mkhowto
by Mark Sapiro June 9, 2006

June 9, 2006

I am one of the developers on the Mailman project. I am trying to make some minor edits to some of our documentation which is maintained as .tex files and then converted to PostScript, PDF, HTML, etc. with mkhowto. I am working under Cygwin/Windows, and I have the following Cygwin packages installed perl 5.8.7-5 python 2.4.3-1 tetex 3.0.0-3 netpbm 10.30-1 I have also installed latex2html 2002-2-1 (1.71) per <http://docs.python.org/doc/cygwin.html>, and it appears to work just fine if run standalone. I have downloaded the source for Python 2.4.0 and am trying to run the makehowto script. I can successfully run mkhowto -pdf sometexfile.tex but if I try to produce any other output format, either with or without -pdf in the same run, I always encounter the error pdfTeX error (ext1): \pdfinfo used while \pdfoutput is not set. <argument> { \def \\{, } \pdfinfo { /Author (\@author ) /Title (\@title ) } } l.12 \maketitle No pages of output. I tried running 'make' in the distribution Python-2.4/Doc/ directory, and I get the same error there too. The offending \def appears to be in Python-2.4/Doc/texinputs/howto.cls. My questions are am I doing something wrong or have I failed to do a necessary step? Can these tools be run on Cygwin at all? Do I need a different (older/newer) version of something? -- Mark Sapiro <msapiro(a)value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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