Tasks

for the documentation team

Coding tasks

for those who want to develop the toolset

Get into the code

The first task for those who want to develop the toolset is to make themselves familiar with it. There are two documents, called doctools/README and doctools/HACKING, which give a short introduction how to use the command line tools and how the code is laid out. Feel free to amend!

Improvement suggestions

I'd like to ask all of you to look at the new built documentation and collect thoughts about it -- not the content, but mainly the infrastructure such as navigational elements, accessibility etc.
Note that the web application does use JavaScript in some places, but only for better usability (hopefully). Users without JavaScript may not lose any functionality. (This should be confirmed every now and then.)

The doctools/TODO file lists some things that should be done. At the moment, these are:

discuss and debug comments system

The comments system is quite new and untested. How it deals with inline comments is not ideal.

write a "printable" (PDF) builder (export to latex, most probably)

Of course, printable output was trivial for LaTeX sources. The Docutils do have a latex writer (two in fact) -- if it is stable enough to be used, it has to be extended to support our extra node types. Else, some other conversion must be devised.

prepare for databases other than sqlite for comments

Does sqlite scale well enough for our comments? Though I think so, we should be prepared to make it easy to substitute something like postgres.

look at the old tools/ scripts, what functionality should be rewritten

There were quite a few tools in Doc/tools/, e.g. looking which modules were documented. Some of this functionality is obsolete now, some of it may be useful.

Py-in-the-sky ideas

add search via Xapian? optionally have a contents tree view in the sidebar (AJAX based)?

Roundup bugs

There are lots of bugs and feature requests in the Python issue tracker at http://bugs.python.org/, and even the occasional patch with category "Documentation". However, most of these are pretty big tasks though, such as (mostly obscure or advanced) features that are not documented, or documented not in the official docs, but some essay (new-style classes!). If you tackle an issue, mention the issue number in the commit message or in the patch email, and I will close the report accordingly.

In the Wiki

There are also quite a few wiki pages concerning things missing from the documentation, see MissingFromDocumentation and CategoryDocumentation.

Python 3000

The Python 3.0 docs are still quite out of date; many PEPs and changes mentioned in "What's new in Python 3" or Misc/NEWS are not documented yet. I've read through the language

reference and done some things myself, but only inserted XXX comments for others.

must be read through and adapted to Python 3 syntax if applicable.