[Distutils] [setuptools] Interactive help (was Re: documentation for mechanize)

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:51 AM 12/19/2005 +0000, John J Lee wrote:
>On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
>
> >>>> import mechanize
> >>>> help(mechanize)
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
>[...]
> > OSError: [Errno 20] Not a directory:
> > '/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/mechanize-0.0.11a-py2.3.egg/mechanize'
> >
> > Does this not work with egg files? Has anyone told the PEAK people about
> > this problem? Is there another way to get at the docstrings? Could we
> > just dump the html output from pydoc to the website?
>
>Is this expected?

pydoc doesn't work on packages in zip files.  It works on *modules* in 
zipfiles, and anything in the modules; it's only packages that it's broken 
for.  I may try to include a monkeypatch for that, as well as a backported 
fix for the Python source, but at the moment the only way to get around it 
is to install with --always-unzip/-Z or set the "not zip-safe" flag in your 
project's setup.py