Extending distutils ??

[Thomas Weholt]

Distutils is great, but adding a few features would make it almost perfect.
Since we allready got a documentation package in the standard distro why
can't Distutils generate documentation using pydoc in the process of
generating a package for distribution? It could create a folder called
doumentation in the root folder of the distribution, putting generated
html-files in that folder, creating subfolders and organizing the files as
needed.

Another thing could be to generate a test-suite for the package using the
doctest-module. The unittest-module is better, but a bit more work and
therefore often skipped. If done right, the documentation in the modules
itself would be used automatically in the distutils-package, providing
up-to-date documentation located in one place and a simple test-suite for
the entire package, placed in one file with a standard name like
package-test.py or something. That way it could be run both before releasing
the package, testing its integrity and for end-users after downloading the
software.

A few parameters could be added to the distutils setup-method;
documentation-folder and test-suite-filename ( ok, those names suck, but you
get the idea ).

If anybody has done any such thing I'd be glad to try their solutions out.
:-)

Best regards,
Thomas