[issue2001] Pydoc interactive browsing enhancement

[Nick Coghlan]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> added the comment:

I'd actually started typing out the command to commit this before it finally clicked that the patch changes public APIs of the pydoc module in incompatible ways. Sure, they aren't documented, but the fact they aren't protected by an underscore means I'm not comfortable with the idea of removing them or radically change their functionality without going through a deprecation period first.

I've attached my version of the patch which includes some additional documentation cleanups and a tweak to test_pyclbr (since the pydoc changes broke that test through no fault of their own).

However, the public (albeit undocumented) nature of the APIs implementing the old Tk GUI means I'm not comfortable committing the patch in a form that simply drops them without going through a deprecation period first.

So, the way forward from here:
1. The good news is beta 1 has been pushed back to December 4 for other reasons, so there's still more time to work on this
2. The gui() function should still open the Tkinter GUI, and the -g option should be retained with its old functionality. Invoking this function should trigger DeprecationWarning.
3. A serve() function to start the web server component should be added back in
4. The new behaviour of opening the web client can be provided as a "browse()" function (that accepts the port number the server is listening on as an argument).

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue2001>
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