[Python-Dev] onlinehelp unforgiving

[Greg Stein]

+1 with Martin.

There is more to online help than the HTML stuff.

Cheers,
-g

On Sun, Jul 16, 2000 at 11:26:45PM +0200, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> After installing the current Python CVS, I tried to do
> 
> >>> from onlinehelp import help
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.0/onlinehelp.py", line 323, in ?
>     help=Help(sys.stdout,24)
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.0/onlinehelp.py", line 216, in __init__
>     raise EnvironmentError, error
> EnvironmentError: Cannot find documentation directory /usr/local/bin/doc. 
> Set the PYTHONDOCS environment variable to point to a "doc" directory.
> It should have a subdirectory "Lib" with a file named "index.html".
> 
> I was mainly interested in seeing the doc string retriever in real
> life. To do so, I'm in the process of obtaining a set of html files
> (hopefully typing make in the Doc directory will give me those).
> 
> Still, I think that module should work without HTML help installed,
> and only fail if somebody tries to access the documentation. Or, there
> should be a function doc() in addition to help() for retrieving and
> printing doc strings.
> 
> I'd actually prefer the second option:
> 
> >>> doc(xml)
> Core XML support for Python.
> 
> This package contains three sub-packages:
> 
> dom -- The W3C Document Object Model.  This supports DOM Level 1 +
>        Namespaces.
> 
> parser -- Python wrappers for XML parsers (currently only supports Expat).
> 
> sax -- The Simple API for XML, developed by XML-Dev, led by David
>        Megginson and ported to Python by Lars Marius Garshol.  This 
>        supports the SAX 2 API.
> 
> should work even without any documentation installed. In any case, I
> think this (or the help function) should be builtin.
> 
> Regards,
> Martin
> 
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-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/