[Python-Dev] Python Doc problems (original) (raw)

Ron Adam rrr at ronadam.com
Sat Sep 30 03:15:04 CEST 2006

Josiah Carlson wrote:

"BJörn Lindqvist" <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:

If there are "rampant criticisms" of the Python docs, then those that are complaining should take specific examples of their complaints to the sourceforge bug tracker and submit documentation patches for the relevant sections. And personally, I've not noticed that criticisms of the Python docs are "rampant", but maybe there is some "I hate Python docs" newsgroup or mailing list that I'm not subscribed to. Meh! The number one complaint IS that you have to take your complaints to the sourceforge bug tracker and submit documentation patches. For documentation changes, that is way to much overhead for to little gain. But thankfully I think there are people working on fixing those problems which is very nice. Are you telling me that people want to be able to complain into the ether and get their complaints heard? I hope not, because that would be insane. Also, "doc patches" are basically "the function foo() should be documented as ...", users don't need to know or learn TeX. Should there be an easier method of submitting doc fixes, etc.? Sure. But people are still going to need to actually report the fixes they want, which they aren't doing in any form now.

Maybe a doc fix day (similar to the bug fix day) would be good. That way we can report a lot of minor doc fix's at once and then they can be fixed in batches.

For example of things I think may be thought of as too trivial to report but effect readability and ease of use with pythons help() function ...

A lot of doc strings have lines that wrap when they are displayed by pythons help() in a standard 80 column console window.

There are also two (maybe more) modules that have single backslash characters in their doc strings that get ate when viewed by pydoc.

 cookielib.py   -  has single '\'s in a diagram.

 SimpleXMLRPCServer.py  - line 31... code example with line continuation.

I wonder if double \ should also be allowed as line continuations so that doctests would look and work ok in doc strings when viewed by pythons help()?

Anyway if someone wants to search for other things of that type they can play around with the hacked together tool included below. Setting it low enough so that indented methods don't wrap with the help() function brings up several thousand instances. I'm hoping most of those are duplicated/inherited doc strings.

Many of those are documented format lines with the form ...

name( longs_list_of_arguments ... ) -> long_list_of_return_types ...

Rather than fix all of those, I'm changing the version of pydoc I've been rewriting to wordwrap lines. Although that's not the prettiest solution, it's better than breaking the indented margin.

 Have fun...  ;-)

Ron

""" Find doc string lines are not longer than n characters.

 Dedenting the doc strings before testing may give more
 meaningful results.

""" import sys import os import inspect import types

class NullType(object): """ A simple Null object to use when None is a valid argument, or when redirecting print to Null. """ def write(self, *args): pass def repr(self): return "Null" Null = NullType()

check = 'CHECKING__________' checkerr = 'ERROR CHECKING____' err_obj = [] err_num = 0 stdout = sys.stdout stderr = sys.stderr seporator = '--------------------------------------------------------' linelength = 100

def main(): sys_path = sys.path # remove invalid dirs for f in sys_path[:]: try: os.listdir(f) except: sys_path.remove(f) #checkmodule('builtin') for mod in sys.builtin_module_names: checkmodule(mod) for dir_ in sys.path: for f in os.listdir(dir_): if f.endswith('.py') or f.endswith('.pyw') or f.endswith('.pyd'): try: checkmodule(f.partition('.')[0]) except Exception: print seporator print checkerr, f, err_obj print ' %s: %s' % (sys.exc_type.name, sys.exc_value) print seporator

def checkmodule(modname): global err_obj err_obj = [modname] # Silent text printed on import. sys.stdout = sys.stderr = Null try: module = import(modname) finally: sys.stdout = stdout sys.stderr = stderr try: checkobj(module) # module doc string for o1 in dir(module): obj1 = getattr(module, o1) err_obj = [modname, o1] checkobj(obj1) # class and function doc strings for o2 in dir(obj1): obj2 = getattr(obj1, o2) err_obj = [modname, o1, o2] checkobj(obj2) # method doc strings finally: del module

def checkobj(obj): global err_num if not hasattr(obj, 'doc'): return doc = str(obj.doc) err_obj.append('doc') lines = doc.split('\n') longlines = [x for x in lines if len(x) > linelength] if longlines: err_num += 1 print seporator print '#%i: %s' % (err_num, '.'.join([str(x) for x in err_obj])) print for x in longlines: print len(x), repr(x.strip())

if name == 'main': main()

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