[Doc-SIG] Re: Oscar - pre-announcement over on Types-SIG

[David Goodger]

Greg Ward <gward@mems-exchange.org> wrote on 2001-08-23 10:13:
> Seems to me that a much neater way to do this would be
> 
> .. grouch-instance-attributes::
> num_legs : int
> the number of legs this animal has
> furry : boolean
> whether this animal is furry or not
> 
> ie. drop the "Instance attributes:" line entirely, and just use a single
> reST directive.  It's just spelling; why say the same thing twice?

True. This would be the way to do Grouch-specific markup, if the 'term :
classifier' definition list markup is inadequate.

> <digression irritation="moderate">
...
> If you had simply used the Distutils "sdist" command

>From "Distributing Python Modules", section 5 "Creating a Source
Distribution":

    ** no MacOS support here **

Guess what OS I use. ;-) I could do sdist on SourceForge, but I don't know
if they even *have* DistUtils there (they still use 1.5.2, so I'd have to
install it myself; I wish they'd upgrade!).

Didn't I read on comp.lang.python that somebody was working on a tarlib.py?

> this would be "rst-0.3.tar.gz" which unpacks to "rst-0.3",
> which is the time-honoured convention for source distributions on Unix,
> used by thousands of programmers for well over a decade.  Grumble.  The
> Distutils exist for a reason!

Point taken; I'll be good in future.

BTW, did you notice install.py? I wrote it as a shortcut to do "python
setup.py install" especially for older Macs. As I'm sure you know, on MacOS
it's not easy to specify command-line options. When I run setup.py on MacOS,
a settings dialog box opens up, which is great, but it takes *forever* on my
old box; install.py avoids the wait (of make & eat a sandwich duration).

Anyhow, in order to avoid the dialog box, I had to write this:

    core._setup_stop_after = 'config'
    dist = do_setup()
    dist.commands = ['install']
    dist.run_commands()

That first line is *really* kludgey. Any chance of making this more
straightforward?

> </digression>

-- 
David Goodger    goodger@users.sourceforge.net    Open-source projects:
 - Python Docstring Processing System: http://docstring.sourceforge.net
 - reStructuredText: http://structuredtext.sourceforge.net
 - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net