Use the Source Luke

[Raymond Hettinger]

On Jan 28, 3:10 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Raymond Hettinger <pyt... at rcn.com> writes:
> > The rest of the blame lies with installers. They all treat
> > human-readable scripts like they were binaries and tuck the code away
> > in a dark corner.
>
> That’s hardly a “blame” of installers. The modules are placed in such
> locations because they need to be accessible in a hierarchy at a
> location that is known to not conflict with anything else, and be
> predictable for the Python interpreter on the system.

Sure.  Installers are just installing where they're supposed to.
And good people have given a lot of thought to the preferred
target directories.  I'm just observing that the source files
are often ending-up out-of-sight and out-of-mind so that fewer
users ever see the source.

It's not deep a problem -- it would only take a symlink to
provide quick access.

My thesis is that we can do even better than that by adding
direct links from the docs to the relevant code with nice
syntax highlighting.


Raymond


P.S.  Making it easy to get to relevant source is only half of
the solution.  The remaining problem is cultural.  Perhaps every
project should have a recommended reading list.

As a start, I think the following are instructive and make for a good
read:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k/Lib/ftplib.py?view=markup
http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k/Lib/heapq.py?view=markup
http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k/Lib/collections.py?view=markup
http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k/Lib/queue.py?view=markup
http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k/Lib/functools.py?view=markup