[Idle-dev] Doc again

[Bruce Sherwood]

After reconsideration, I don't like my suggestion to put documentation 
links into the IDLE configuration mechanism. Someone might build an 
alternative IDE, or none, and still want to be able to get to documentation 
in a standardized way. Or people might use something as simple as having 
their browsers keep a pointer to Doc/index.html.

The key issue is that users, and some applications, want/need to customize 
the documentation. That suggests that we look away from idlefork and toward 
Doc/index.html. How might we make that file customizable?

For starters, the standard Python distribution could put its current 
index.html in a different file, Python.html, and place in index.html a 
redirect operation, so that accessing an unmodified index.html would 
silently and rapidly pass the browser through to Python.html.

VPython could install its own VPython.html and modify index.html to have 
two entries to click, one to go to Python.html and one to go to 
VPython.html. But a user might have already customized index.html to point 
to several documentation sources. So what VPython (and other applications) 
should do is append links to a list in index.html, not overwrite index.html.

Admittedly, appending to an html file is a trickier operation, but since 
Python is present at the time of appending, one could perhaps have the user 
execute a Python module to do this work. And we could establish the 
convention that this is the only proper way to edit index.html. I admit 
that I don't entirely see how best to do this and hope that others will 
comment.

Ideally, especially to benefit novice users (and many VPython users have 
never programmed before), the installation process needs to be very simple. 
We have been refining the VPython installation process a lot over the last 
year as we understand better the kinds of difficulties ordinary users have 
with installers. This issue has to be taken into account, and it represents 
another argument against asking the naive user to edit IDLE's configuration 
file(s).

Bruce