[Python-Dev] pydoc for 2.1b1?

[Guido van Rossum]

> It's my birthday today, and i think it would be a really awesome
> present if pydoc.py were to be accepted into the distribution. :)

Congratulations, Ping.

> (Not just because it's my birthday, though.  I would hope it is
> worth accepting based on its own merits.)

No, it's being accepted because your name is Ping.  I just read the
first few pages of the script for Monty Python's Meaning of Life,
which figures a "machine that goes 'Ping'".  That makes your name
sufficiently Pythonic.

> The most recent version of pydoc is just a single file, for the
> easiest possible setup -- zero installation effort.  You only need
> the "inspect" module to run it.  You can find it under the CVS tree
> at nondist/sandbox/help/pydoc.py or download it from
> 
>     http://www.lfw.org/python/pydoc.py
>     http://www.lfw.org/python/inspect.py
> 
> Among other things, it now handles a few corner cases better, the
> formatting is a bit improved, and you can now tell it to write out
> the documentation to files on disk if that's your fancy (it can
> still display the documentation interactively in your shell or your
> web browser).

You can check these into the regular tree.  I guess they both go into
the Lib directory, right?  Make sure pydoc.py is checked in with +x
permissions.  I'll see if we can import pydoc.help into __builtin__ in
interactive mode.

Now let's paaaartaaaay!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)