[Zope-dev] Zpydoc

Terry Hancock hancock@anansispaceworks.com
Wed, 4 Jun 2003 23:59:14 -0700


On Wednesday 04 June 2003 03:04 pm, alan milligan wrote:
> As you may recall, I made a posting regarding this Zope-specific pydoc tool 
> over a week ago.

Um, maybe I'm out of line here, but "over a week ago" sounds
like a really short time ago.

> Since then there has been half a dozen downloads, but I am yet to receive 
> any feedback :(

Probably like me, they said "oh cool, I want to try that out" and
downloaded it right away, planning to check it out "next time
they start tinkering with Zope".

> I know that documentation is about as exciting as a really unexciting thing, 
> but would like just five minutes from Zope Corporation (and anyone else 
> whose interested...) to at least suggest this effort is misguided and/or has 
> no place in the larger documentation framework of Python/Zope.

In general, you have to pay people if you want them to
"come when called". ;-)

> Again, you can have a quick spin on the demo at 
> http://www.last-bastion.net/Zpydoc.
> 
> I look forward to a critique.

The on-site demo looks cool.  I definitely think it is not misguided. In
fact, I have been looking for better ways to incorporate more
automatic documentation for my own product (for me as well as
for others), and adapting pydoc is one of the better ways to
achieve this.

If I may suggest a couple of similar things to check into --

Check out Dieter Maurer's "DocFinder" product, and also look into
the Interface python module shipped with Zope.  I would really
like to see Interface's introspection directly accessable from the
ZMI, since I am using interfaces as my primary method of 
documentation now.

Some of these things might be security problems in a production
environment, BTW -- I think it's important to bill this as a tool for
development servers (as is DocFinder and some other useful
products).

All in all, though, don't get too impatient -- people take time to
look into things, especially when we are unpaid with bill collectors
beating on our doors, so to speak. ;-)

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com