Bitching about the documentation...

[John J. Lee]

"BartlebyScrivener" <rpdooling at gmail.com> writes:

> Thank you. I shall try that the next time I see something in the
> documentation for beginners. Generally the Python docs are quite good,
> in my opinion. I was merely taking issue with the poster who suggested
> that Python novices and nonprogrammers should complain less and
> contribute more. It's not immediately apparent how to contribute. And
> if you go looking via the main page you end up in a LaTex tutorial.

Just by-the-way: Actually the Python docs use a really restricted
range of LaTeX commands, so you really need know *nothing* about LaTeX
even if you *do* go to the trouble of supplying LaTeX markup.  Just
follow what you see in the files in eg. python/trunk/Doc/lib/lib*.tex
(if you scan through the list of markup available in the 'Documenting
Python' manual, even better), and be sure to warn of the fact that
you're a LaTeX newbie when uploading patches so committers know what
they're getting.

(My advice is don't try to *compile* the docs unless you're ready for
some pain, though -- last time I looked it was quite unpleasant to get
it working.)

Also, note that Python is now in SVN, no longer in CVS:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Doc/lib/
http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Doc/lib/
http://www.python.org/dev/devfaq.html#subversion-svn

http://docs.python.org/doc/doc.html


John