[Pythonmac-SIG] where does the documentation go?

[Kevin Altis]

> From: Jack Jansen
>
> On woensdag, 6 augustus 2003, at 19:59PM, Russell E. Owen wrote:
>
> > I'm using MacPython 2.3 on OS X and have the documentation installed
> > via
> > the package manager. However, I'd like to link to it from my normal web
> > browser and I've had no luck tracking down the html files. They don't
> > appear to be in the framework itself, nor in /Library/Documentation nor
> > in ~/Library/Documentation nor...we'll, I've looked a lot of places but
> > obviously not the right one!
>
> They are in
> /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/
> Python.app/Contents/Resources. The reason for this is that when I
> initially put them in the framework Apple Help Viewer refused to
> recognize them, it seems it really is only interested in .app bundles.
>
> And, to answer Israel's message too: standard web browsers can handle
> them just fine, there's a few additions to the html files that bother
> no-one. And the one thing that Apple Help Viewer has in it's favor is
> the index. Now if only it would let me find things through the Help
> Viewer and then provided a popup menu or a button to view the results
> in a decent browser...

Okay, so the MacPython distribution doesn't contain the Python docs at all?
It looks like it just points the user to the online version? Ugh, I feel
dumb for missing this earlier. It isn't user friendly to require a special
download, more so since the docs won't even show up unless you do an rm on
some special files. I'm a bit scared to go deleting the suggested files.

ls ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.*help*
/Users/altis/Library/Preferences/com.apple.help.plist
/Users/altis/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpui.plist
/Users/altis/Library/Preferences/com.apple.helpviewer.plist
/Users/altis/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.helper.plist

Will all of these really get rebuilt?

Sadly, I can't use the Open File dialog with Safari to open the downloaded
docs because it won't look inside the English.lproj directory. Luckily, I
can just use the webbrowser module, so I just checked in a change to
codeEditor to use the local docs if they exist, sweet.

webbrowser.open('file:///Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/
Current/Resources/Python.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/
PythonDocumentation/index.html')

The Windows EXE installer which is around 9MB does contain the complete
documentation tree. I just made a quick zip of my c:\Python23\Doc directory
and it is around 3MB but I'm sure that could be made even smaller by
tweaking the compression settings, using bz2...

I recommend future distributions including the complete documentation rather
than requiring a separate download via the Package Manager. It seems like
there should a be link to the docs in the MacPython-2.3 folder too, but I
guess that isn't the Mac OS X way?

On a related note, can there be an additional Python alias in the
MacPython-2.3 folder rather than just having it sit in the Applications
folder?

And on yet another note, when 2.3.1, 2.3.2, etc. come out will that be
available via Apple's System Update or will users have to wait until Apple's
next "Big Cat" release?

ka