[Python-Dev] undocumented help() function change in Python 3.4?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 2:59 PM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com>wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:57:36 +0100, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Am 11.03.2014 15:54, schrieb Guido van Rossum:
> > > I'm not sure I agree completely with this lax attitude about the
> contents of the
> > > docs, and especially the What's New parts of it (both Misc/NEWS and
> > > Doc/whatsnew/3.4.rst).
> >
> > I don't think anyone here suggested not to update the whatsnew document.
> >
> > > I find it very useful to have these pinpoint *exactly*
> > > what made it into the tarball or zipfile or whatever other form I
> happen to find
> > > the release -- you don't always have the full hg logs lying around,
> nor do you
> > > always know from which exact revision or tag a tree was built.
>
> As far as NEWS goes, I fixed some issue callouts so they'll be links in
> the online version, I deleted a couple redundant entries, I fixed wording
> here and there, and I added...three?...entries that were missing but I
> found the commits from the versionadded or versionchanged doc updates
> they contained that Serhiy found.  I'm sure there are other missing NEWS
> entries that weren't caught, so wanting to know *exactly* what is in the
> release is a lost cause unless you look at the commit log :) Especially
> since the revision that contains the commit related to those added
> news entries does *not* contain the news entry I added, so if you had
> a tarball built from that revision you wouldn't have that news entry...
>

OK, understood. The thing is that I like the granularity of Misc/NEWS -- it
doesn't cover everything, but it covers pretty much everything you might
care about. The changelog is way too verbose.

--David
>
> PS: Also, sad to say I picked up the What's New task late in the 3.3
> release cycle, and even with doing additional work *after* final I did
> not finish.  So that document may be missing stuff...and in any case,
> What's New never promises to include *everything*.  I have been more
> completest in 3.4 than Raymond (intentionally) was for 3.2, but it still
> doesn't have *every* enhancement.
> <https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org>
>

I think that's a feature. What's New has always been an opinionated
document -- it goes from most to least important, and has a structure that
makes "skimming" particularly efficient.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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