[Idle-dev] IDLEfork / Docs / Startup etc.

[StephenM.Gava]

Whoa, be offline for a couple of days and come back to a flurry of idle-dev 
mail. 8^)

For starters:

Guido Wrote:
> I believe Stephen is still working on the configuration dialogs.

Yes, I am. The beginnings of this work have been in idlefork cvs for a while 
now, and I've been making minor commits from time to time when I get the 
chance. I think I'm finally able to be able to spend some 'quality time' 
again on this (famous last words) so it should begin moving along more 
quickly again. When this is done I'll make another point release tarball for 
people to hammer on and find all the inevitable bugs.

The things I'd like to see finished or done in idlefork before its next 
stable release (and possible mergeing into python idle) are, mainly: gui user 
configurability and properly working debugging.

On the subject of debugging, I had previously thought that it was something 
we had broken a little somehow in the process of merging in the last couple 
of years of changes and bug fixes from stable idle, but it appears that may 
not be the case. Can anybody tell me, was debugging ever working as expected 
since the initial VPython changes in idle fork?  Can anyone who contributed 
to those changes (David?) let me know where to start looking at getting it 
working again, or is this problem an unavoidable result of the current remote 
execution impementation?

Both the documentation lookup and startup behaviour issues should be 
mitigated by the idle configuration system changes. As well as having a 
command line switch to specify startup behaviour, the user's preferred style 
of idle startup will also be able to be saved as a configuration item. As for 
help documentation: if pressing the "F1" (or configured help) key is to 
retain it's sensible common meaning of "help on using this application" then 
I believe it should by default pop up help on using idle itself (and the 
python documentation could be on shift-F1 for instance), but on the subject 
of help files, following an earlier suggestion by Guido I have begun 
implementing user configurable help sources. This would mean that the user 
can configure whatever additional help files they wish, and they will appear 
on the idle help menu for launching form there.

The VPython folks should be able to just distribute a modified 
'configuration defaults' file with their idle to enable their preferred 
startup behaviour and additional help source(s) by default.  

Stephen.
-- 
Stephen M. Gava  <elguavas@users.sourceforge.net>
IDLEfork ( http://idlefork.sourceforge.net )  " just like IDLE, only crunchy "