[Python-Dev] Best practice for documentation for std lib (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Sep 22 20:40:41 CEST 2013

On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

I think there's a general agreement in this thread that we don't intend to change the status quo. Both .rst docs and docstrings are important. The remaining question is - can we use some tool to generates parts of the former from the latter and thus avoid duplication and rot?

I don't think that duplication is much of an issue. Natural language understanding is not at the level yet where you can generate a meaningful summary from a longer text fully automatically (let alone vice versa :-) so I think having to write both a concise docstring and a longer more detailed description for the Doc tree is not a waste of effort at all.

As for rot, it's just as likely that rot occurs as a result of autogeneration. Having to edit/patch the source code in order to improve the documentation most likely adds an extra barrier towards improving the docs.

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