[Doc-SIG] Re: Ho hum - back to work...

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

Edward D. Loper wrote:
> > Well, I recovered from my flu (eventually) and am now back to
> > "normal".
>
> That's good to hear.  I was beginning to worry that you didn't like us
> anymore. :)

Oh no - silence is golden, and all that.

Seriously, I have lost a lot of the drive to steal time away from other
things (and we had a *major* backlog of ironing, too), so I suspect that
I am going to do much less implementation work. Which should not be a
problem if you and David are willing to code.

> It does seem like it would be nice to have a parser with which we can
> try a number of different rules..  And since you've already spent a
> fair amount of time on that, that seems like a reasonable thing to
> work on.

Unfortunately, I used some of Friday up on non-Python things (isn't that
just the way), and it's clear that there is more than a couple of days
work needed on fat.py.

I may get round to work on it, but it's likely to be slow...

(if someone else wants the current code, I'll update the web stuff - but
of course working on someone else's code at this stage in development
isn't necessarily unalloyed joy)

> > 2. Work on the Doc-SIG archives, to try to produce summaries of the
> > arguments from its lifetime. Note that (technically) we may need
> > this for any PEPs we produce! (and it would clearly be useful to be
> > able to *point* to who said what and why, given the history of the
> > group).
>
> I tried to do this a few weeks back, (including copius pointers to
> individual articles), but gave up because I don't have *that* much
> free time. :) But it would be *really* useful to have, I think, and it
> you're more familiar with the archives, then maybe it wouldn't take as
> long.. At least getting a start on it would be nice.

In the end that's what I started work on. It would be easier if my
modem/internet connection were reliable to download the whole archive,
but I've got up to beginning of December 2000 as one file, and have got
*most* of the way through removing non-relevant messages (damn - why do
so many of them have to be interesting) and starting to populate the
inside of my head with what previous arguments have said.

I think there will be some serious issues (particularly about the grand
scope/applicability of what Doc-SIG is trying to do for docstrings) that
emerge, so it does seem important to do.

> Overall, I'd say to work on docutils/fat.py, but mainly because you've
> already invested a fair amount of work in it.  Maybe we can convince
> someone else to do the doc-sig summary stuff?  :)

Oh well, I chose the other one for now.

The issues to be resolved include:

* strip out the support for the "initial one line summary" stuff that
Guido *doesn't* need, after all
* remove them from docstrings (both of these are trivial, of course)
* change the literal quote character to be backtick (trivial)
* add support for underlined headers (hmm)
* add (optional) support for your "lists must be indented after the
first line"
* add (optional) support for "blank lines between list items" (trivial)
* add (optional) support for "blank lines needed before and after lists"
(more complex, and I'm not convinced useful)
* add support for your "markup significant regardless of placement"
(strikes me as hard given the way the program currently works - needs
more thought)
* add (optional) support for requiring URIs to be in "<" and ">"

I toyed with doing everything except the markup one (since I'm still not
convinced on that issue), but it looked like more work than I'd
obviously have time for, so I put it off.

Other issues in other threads...

Tibs

--
Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.co.uk/
"How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive
continuity of ducks." - Dorothy L. Sayers, "Gaudy Night"
My views! Mine! Mine! (Unless Laser-Scan ask nicely to borrow them.)