Python Continuous Documentation

https://github.com/icgood/continuous-docs/

by icgood • 11 years ago

40 9 11 years ago

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what this project does rather than advocate use of Sphinx and provide some tools to set it up, that is, what is continuous about it, I don't know. Perhaps something to work on in the README.

All being said, Sphinx is a decent tool (and I wrote WAAY too much of it in the last three years), but I have grown to strongly dislike reStructured Text -- I have to look up the URL linking syntax, for instance, almost every time I use it.

Having something like Sphinx that ate Markdown instead would make me rather happy.

illumen• 11 years ago

Having a cheat sheet around, or editor support helps.

I'm not sure fragmenting doc string syntax further is a good idea for the python community. There's been efforts to support Markdown on pypi for README.md. But even that has been met with a lot of resistance.

zo1• 11 years ago

I really don't understand this. Everyone wants to do it their way when it comes to docstrings. One of the big unfortunate culprits is "PyDev", which is an Eclipse plugin for python development. It's sole developer decided to divert from the already-established (if not already-hacky) docstring format of type hinting for lists. So now, instead of: "list of str", we have to contend with another format of: "list(str)".

I can't wait for the python PEP standards for function-annotation to become standard and permeate the editors.

bpicolo• 11 years ago

I don't think it does provide any new tools? (None that I noticed).

That said, I use sphinx a lot. I think it's a totally fine tool

mplewis• 11 years ago

Continuous documentation is continuous because you just edit your docstrings, push to GitHub, and your docs are now updated.

mpdehaan22• 11 years ago

Got it -- more of a README/ HOWTO than a project/application. Thanks!

agj2• 11 years ago

Sphinx, or rather Docutils, does eat Markdown now: https://github.com/rtfd/recommonmark

There is no access to Sphinx's directives/extensions, as it implements Commonmark support, which doesn't yet offer an extension syntax as part of the spec. Once it does, writing in Markdown will me more useful, but currently it's limited to basic markup and naive linking.

goblin89• 11 years ago

Great initiative, but beware relying on automatically generated documentation. Keep units documented in the code, and have your higher-level docs handwritten and hand-structured elsewhere, is the policy I’ve arrived at lately.

(It doesn’t make sense to spend resources on having units documented separately from code, because you don’t need such docs unless you’re working with code. Loads of auto-generated docs also gives a false impression of your project being properly documented, which it isn’t unless you also have higher-level hand-written documentation somewhere.

Similarly, it doesn’t make sense to keep high-level architecture docs in docstrings, as it’s not tied to specific modules, and you normally need it when you’re thinking big picture as opposed to working with specific code units.)

Overall, kudos—good documentation is important.

If you’re concerned about writing good documentation, I recommend reading these series by Jacob Kaplan-Moss (of Django core development team): https://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/

agj2• 11 years ago

It's worth mentioning the besides the steps for requirements installation, this workflow isn't limited to Python. Sphinx has support for writing referential documentation with many other languages. Integrating with per-language tools to provide automatically generated reference docs is something we're starting to build out more with https://github.com/rtfd/sphinx-autoapi, though it's still in its early stages.

Python Continuous Documentation

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