[Python-Dev] The docs, reloaded

[Titus Brown]

On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 11:45:04AM -0500, skip at pobox.com wrote:
-> 
->     >> You at least take away a common excuse for lack of contributions.
->     >> True whiners will just come up with new ones (e.g., "the
->     >> documentation isn't available in Sanskrit yet" or "the dog ate my
->     >> changes before I could type them into the computer"). ;-)
-> 
->     Steve> But doesn't *everyone* now know that documentation contributions
->     Steve> don't have to be marked up? It's certainly been said
->     Steve> enough.
-> 
-> Sure, but that doesn't stop the true whiners. ;-)

Nothing stops the true whiners ;).

I think new and exciting ways of viewing, searching, annotating, linking
to/from, and indexing the docs are more important than new formats for
(not) writing the docs.

For example, this rocks! ::

	http://pydoc.gbrandl.de/search.html?q=os.path&area=default

There have been (good) efforts to wikify the docs in the past. IMO what
would make them really work would be to have docs.python.org, the
"official" Python docs location, start hosting these efforts.  As long
as that location is static, I think the majority of users will ignore
other efforts.

cheers,
--titus

p.s. Are there good directions for installing the toolchain for current
docs building anywhere?  I've tried once or twice, but despite a lot of
LaTeX experience I could never get everything hooked up right.