[Python-Dev] Fwd: Re: Encouraging developers

[Raymond Hettinger]

[Facundo]
>> Me, for example, has an actual question to this list: "How can I know,
>> if I change something in the doc's .tex files, that I'm not broking
>> the TeX document structure?".

[MvL]
>You don't have to know. As a general contributor, just submit your
>patch, and perhaps the reviewer will catch the error. As a submitter,
>just submit the code, and George Yoshida will catch it. It's not
>strictly necessary that the documentation actually builds all
>the time. If you want to be sure it builds, run "make html" in
>Doc.

We should try to keep the documentation buildable at all times so that it will remain visible to everyone at http://docs.python.org/dev/ .

The script in Tools/scripts/texcheck.py does a pretty good job of detecting the most common LaTeX markup errors.

For small doc changes, it is usually not too much of a challenge because you're either modifying existing text or are copying in existing markup from the surrounding text.


Raymond