[issue2001] Pydoc interactive browsing enhancement

[Ron Adam]

Ron Adam <ron_adam at users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:

> What about http://bugs.python.org/issue2001#msg114326 ?

Thanks for the reminder.


To Nick:

>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.

I think it would be ok sense this is a 'user' interface rather than a programming interface, but it won't hurt to ask specifically about this on python dev.  I got the impression that pydoc is considered a 'user' tool like idle, that just happens to live in lib, so the rules aren't considered to be quite as strict as it would be if it was a module meant to be used by other modules or programs.


>3. A serve() function to start the web server component should be >added back in

There is a _startserver() function.  The leading  underscore can be removed, or it can be renamed to serve.  A serve() function could also just call _startserver().


>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.
>
>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).


After the patch the gui() function starts the server with a server text command window, and opens the browser to the correct page.  If you close the browser, you can use 'b' at the server prompt to reopen the browser at the address it is serving.

It sounds like you want "serve()" to just start the server. and "browse()" to just start the browser.  The gui() function does both in one step.

What would be the equivalent new way of doing both in one step, if gui() retains the old tk behavior?

Cheers, Ron

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