ANN: HappyDoc 2.0.1

[Philip Swartzleonard]

Fernando Pérez || Tue 05 Feb 2002 08:36:09a:

> Doug Hellmann wrote:
> 
>> Announcing the latest version of HappyDoc, a Python documentation
>> extraction tool 

And the pesants rejoiced:
Yeeeeey.
[mightn'magic 4 or jonny bravo, take your pick :]

> An honest, non-trolling question: considering the amount of overlap
> that happydoc and pydoc seem to have, and that pydoc is included by
> default with python, what are the chances of merging the two?

Hmm.. i can't really remeber what pydoc's html output looked like (it does 
do that, right? :), but I liked happy's a lot better when i compared them, 
and i think it had a better customization framework...
 
> It seems to make sense to me. Pydoc provides the help() function for
> the prompt and the nice 'pydoc -g' server on localhost:7464 (I have no
> idea if happydoc offers similar services). But it tends to choke on
> tricky imports and produce empty documentation pages way too often for
> my taste. So maybe merging the best of the two into something
> distributed by default would be a good idea.
> 
> I simply think that whatever comes by default with the python distro
> tends to get vastly more use/exposure, so the best tool should go
> there. And since happydoc seems to address at least one of pydoc's
> problems (failing imports in certain cases), it would be in the best
> open source spirit to produce a better tool out of the best features of
> these two, IMHO. 

Well, pydoc provides internal, interactive help, and happy seems to be 
geared toward producing static documents (of which i think it does a better 
job)... but I don't see any moral reason why happydoc's html output system 
and better introspection (and whatever else it does good) couldn't be 
merged into pydoc. :\

-- 
Philip Sw "Starweaver" [rasx] :: www.rubydragon.com