Georg Brandl wrote:

Brett Cannon schrieb:

...

...

...

Issue 2873 - htmllib is slated to go, but pydoc still uses it. Then again, pydoc is busted thanks to the new doc format.

I will try to handle this in the coming week.

Fred had the interesting suggestion of removing pydoc in Py3K based on the thinking that documentation tools like pydoc should be external to Python. With the docs now so easy to generate directly, should pydoc perhaps just be gutted to only what is needed for help() to work?

pydoc is fine for displaying docstring help, and interactive help. This should stay.

Of course, it would also be nice for ``help("if")`` to work effortlessly, which it currently only does if the generated HTML documentation is available somewhere, which it typically isn't -- on Unix most distributions put it in a separate package (from which pydoc won't always find it of its own), on Windows only the CHM file is distributed and must be decompiled to get single HTML files.

Now that the docs are reST, the source is almost pretty enough to display it raw, but I could also imagine a "text" writer that removes the more obscure markup to present a casual-reader-friendly text version.

The needed sources could then be distributed with Python -- it shouldn't be more than about 200 kb.

The versioned documentation will sometimes be available from the Internet if you want to think about using that as a fallback source. It *would* be nice if help("if") worked. It would be even handier if help(if) worked, but that's a syntax problem, and it would be a horrendous one to overcome, I suspect. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/