Python evolution: Unease

[John Roth]

"Paul Rubin" <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote in message 
news:7xhdlwh5qs.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com...
> "alex23" <wuwei23 at gmail.com> writes:

>> It's called "having an opinion". "Good" documentation does its job, if
>> noone else thought it was poorly documented then to them it wasn't.

...


>
>> In short: grow up and just write the damn documentation.

I've been reading this thread and quietly congratulating myself
on staying out of it, but this statement takes the cake.

I would like to contribute some documentation to Python.
I've got the time, I write quite a bit, etc. I've got fairly
strong opinions about some things that need to be documented,
(such as all the new style class descriptor stuff from 2.2)
and I have relatively little difficulty matching the existing style.

However, I don't
know TEX, Latex, CVS or Sourceforge. (The latter two are
on my "learn sometime soon so I can put PyFIT where it belongs"
list.)

I have no desire to install Perl to run the documentation toolchain.
I also have no particular desire to write up a bunch of final
format stuff and drop it on someone else to put into the latex
format so it can be included.

That means I'm not going to spend literally months learning
all of this stuff so I can then spend the two or three days
(each) it would take to write decent documentation for the
places I think are lacking, and where I have the
competence to write it up.

I'm also not going to spend those same months writing
a current source to XML translator, and then writing
XSLT or more scripts to do the translations to final
format, a strategy which would arguably be much more
beneficial for the Python community as a whole.

The bottom line is that I'm not going to be writing any
extensive pieces of Python documentation. My time
is better spent elsewhere.

John Roth