[Python-Dev] The docs, reloaded

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:23:47AM -0400, Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
> I'll be happy to pull the existing tools out into a separate distribution if 
> we move to something else for Python.  There are too many users of the 
> existing tools to abandon.

That seems like a straightforward task.  

The big stumbling block in switching away from LaTeX has always been
the effort of making a good conversion; if Georg's work does 80% of
the job, we should definitely take advantage of the opportunity and 
try to switch.

Advantages of reST:

* The required tool chain shrinks (at least if you're not making printed
  output, which will probably still go through LaTeX).
* Tool chain is now more easily scriptable, and it'll be easier to 
  make use of the docs from Python code.
* We can produce XML output through the rst2xml script.

Disadvantages:

* reST markup isn't much simpler than LaTeX.

--amk