[Doc-SIG] Reference guide, and images

[Georg Brandl]

A.M. Kuchling schrieb:
> 1) The reference guide occasionally refers to past Python versions,
> mentioning that a feature was introduced in such-and-such a version.  
> For example, in lexical_analysis.rst:
> 
> .. [#] In versions of Python prior to 2.4, octal and hexadecimal
>    literals in the range just above the largest representable plain
>    integer but below the largest unsigned 32-bit number (on a machine
>    using 32-bit arithmetic), 4294967296, were taken as the negative
>    plain integer obtained by subtracting 4294967296 from their
>    unsigned value.
> 
> Should the reference guide include this past history, or just describe 
> the version of Python it's shipped with?

Personally, I'm fine with these notes within in the 2.x series. For the
3.0, I'd like to remove them, just as we've removed all versionadded/changed
tags.

> 2) With the shift to HTML and Sphinx, it's probably much easier to include 
> images in the docs.  (I'm thinking of reviving the railroad syntax
> diagrams.)  What image format would be best?  Bitmaps (PNG/JPG) or
> vector (SVG)?

PNG would be my choice since it's widely supported and loss-free. SVG
is nice but browser adoption is lousy.

For latex output, PNG works with pdflatex, for postscript I'll have to
whip up a conversion stage.

> 3) In the 'what's new', I have comments recording bug and patch
> numbers, because it's useful information for me.  It strikes me
> that this information might be interesting to include as part of
> the published HTML.  Does that seem like a good idea?  I envision
> something very brief; perhaps the text would read "Contributed by 
> so-so; <patch #X>.  Can anyone suggest a better rendering?

Apart from rendering questions, this is something a custom role can do
nicely:

Contributed by Joe; :issue:`9999`.

I'll add one to the custom Python extensions.

Georg