[Python-Dev] query: docstring formatting in python distutils code (original) (raw)

Martin Geisler mg at lazybytes.net
Wed Jul 7 22:58:47 CEST 2010

"C. Titus Brown" <ctb at msu.edu> writes:

I guess docutils isn't in the stdlib (should it be?) or else we could modify 'help' to use it to prepare a straight text formatting.

We're using light-weight ReST markup in the Mercurial help texts and transform it into straight text upon display in the terminal.

We want no external dependencies for Mercurial, so I wrote a "mini ReST" parser in about 400 lines of code. It cheats a lot and can only handle simple constructs... but maybe it would be interesting for Python's help? You find it here:

http://selenic.com/hg/file/tip/mercurial/minirst.py

Its test and the corresponding output shows the markup it can parse:

http://selenic.com/hg/file/tip/tests/test-minirst.py http://selenic.com/hg/file/tip/tests/test-minirst.py.out

It would of course be much nicer to have Docutils in the standard library. I'm not a Docutils developer, but to me it seems that Docutils is now a very stable and widely used package, so it would IMHO make sense to include it.

-- Martin Geisler

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