[Python-ideas] docs.python.org

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Sat Oct 27 13:34:44 CEST 2012


On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 7:22 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Yury Selivanov <yselivanov.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Start with docs switching to py3k by default.  That shouldn't be harmful
>> (and I hope that my docs theme patch will be accepted soon).
>
> Actually, there are at least a few very real harms that come from
> switching the docs over:
> 1. Many third party Python 2 tutorials include links to our docs. We
> can't magically reach out to those sites and update their links, so
> they will end up linking to Python 3 resources from Python 2 ones

As a data point, MIT's '6.00x Introduction to Computer Science and
Programming' EdX online course contains many links of the form
"http://docs.python.org/library/...".  I don't have exact numbers, but
judging by the EPD download numbers we've been seeing there are
definitely thousands of students, and probably tens of thousands,
taking that course.  Switching docs.python.org without a generous
warning period would not be a good idea for those students.

--
Mark



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