[Pythonmac-SIG] Macintosh modules/Carbon/documentation

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 31 Mar, 2007, at 1:49, Jack Jansen wrote:

>
> On  30-Mar-2007, at 22:55 , Kevin Walzer wrote:
>
>> Looking at the "Macintosh Library" documentation that ships with  
>> 2.5, I
>> see a lot of outdated stuff: references to the old PythonIDE,
>> PackageManager, and so on. What is the process for updating these  
>> docs,
>> submitting a bug report, etc.?
>>
>> Also, there appears to be a lot of modules in the "Macintosh
>> Library"--Carbon modules, generally--that are undocumented, or are
>> broken, or (almost as bad) no one know if they work or not. Has  
>> anyone
>> gone through these to sort out what works, what should be deprecated,
>> etc.? Does it make sense to deprecate the entire Carbon module?  
>> What's
>> the process for this?
>
>
> I had a chat about this with Ronald a few months ago, where we  
> basically went through all the modules. Ronald,
> do you have your notes handy?

I have them somewhere, I'll see if I can find them. From what I  
remember a lot of the "Macintosh Library" is ancient and should be  
removed, but that's mostly when looking at a list of toplevel  
modules, not in code size.

One thing we (Jack and I) talked about is moving at least the Carbon  
modules to its own separate project instead of being part of the  
standard library. The most important reason for this is that the  
Carbon modules and Python itself should be on a different release  
schedule: the Carbon should track whatever Apple is doing instead of  
having to wait until the next major release of Python before new APIs  
can be added.

A major stumbling block for that is that someone needs to step up to  
commit to maintaining the thing.

>
> Carbon itself should be fine. It is indeed undocumented within the  
> Python documentation, but the transformation from the official  
> Apple C documentation is pretty clear (I think).

You're a bit biased in that regard :-). I try to steer clear of  
Carbon and can't really comment on the quality of the Carbon modules  
and how easy it is to use them.

Ronald

> --
> Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen at cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
> If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma  
> Goldman
>
>
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