[Distutils] introspecting package data

[David Lyon]

On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:45:56 +0100, Chris Withers
wrote:
>> Yes, it would be cool to be able to read this out and
>> autoupdate the build/version numbers.....
> 
> Bingo.
> 
> I find it pretty surprising, given Sphinx's acceptance in the python 
> world, that no-one appears to have done this this!

Well, there could be many reasons for that....

I'd say that writing the code to accomplish what you want is trivial.

We could just write a script that:

 - reads the setup.py, 
 - takes out the "from distutils.core.." 
 - replace it with something else...
 - use the metadata (already in memory) to
 - update whatever it is in sphinx (?conf.py)
 - write that file as an 'updatesphinx.py' or whatever
 - run it and bingo

Surely at some point, integrating sphinx into distutils has got to
get on the roadmap.... (???)

What project doesn't need better documentation?

What better python tool is there than sphinx?

How good would it be if all projects had sphinx based documentation.

So it leaves me with the question - why not? (maybe nobody is listening -
haha)

David