It's my birthday today, and i think it would be a really awesome present if pydoc.py were to be accepted into the distribution. :)
Congratulations, Ping.
(Not just because it's my birthday, though. I would hope it is worth accepting based on its own merits.)
No, it's being accepted because your name is Ping. I just read the first few pages of the script for Monty Python's Meaning of Life, which figures a "machine that goes 'Ping'". That makes your name sufficiently Pythonic.
The most recent version of pydoc is just a single file, for the easiest possible setup -- zero installation effort. You only need the "inspect" module to run it. You can find it under the CVS tree at nondist/sandbox/help/pydoc.py or download it from
http://www.lfw.org/python/pydoc.py http://www.lfw.org/python/inspect.py
Among other things, it now handles a few corner cases better, the formatting is a bit improved, and you can now tell it to write out the documentation to files on disk if that's your fancy (it can still display the documentation interactively in your shell or your web browser).
You can check these into the regular tree. I guess they both go into the Lib directory, right? Make sure pydoc.py is checked in with +x permissions. I'll see if we can import pydoc.help into __builtin__ in interactive mode. Now let's paaaartaaaay! --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)