Documentation and Docstring Format

[Tim Flink]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2014 10:03:24 -0400 (EDT)
Kamil Paral <kparal at redhat.com> wrote:

> > > https://pythonhosted.org/an_example_pypi_project/sphinx.html#auto-directives
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I'm not suggesting that we drop everything and fix all the
> > > docstrings right now but I am suggesting that we start following
> > > the sphinx docstring format for new code and fix other-formatted
> > > docstrings as we come across them.
> > > 
> > > Any objections?
> > 
> > Well, my only objection is, that the Sphinx format has IMHO the
> > worst impact on how docstrings look.
> 
> That is my impression as well [1]. The improved versions of Markdown
> are more legible and easier to remember than ReST (+Sphinx) [2].
> OTOH, there are certain Sphinx features that look really great (for
> example documentation of attributes or global variables). So let's
> try it. 

This gets down to personal preference but in general, I prefer ReST to
markdown.

I thought that we had already decided to use sphinx when mike did his
documentation tool survey a couple of months ago.

> > Maybe it is just me, but I use help() more often than html docs.
> 
> The Spyder editor shows HTML output of docstrings, even though it
> seems it uses plain ReST conversion instead of Sphinx conversion.
> 
> > 
> > But other than that, I have no issues.
> 
> I played with it a little and the syntax is quite complex. If we are
> to use it, we will need at least:
> 1. basic sphinx config committed into the repository
> 2. some instructions in the readme how to generate the docs

Yeah, my plan is to have sphinx docs live in the same repo as
libtaskotron so changes can be built locally before submitting any
patches.

"build docs" sounds like a reasonable section to have in the dev
documentation.

> so that we can at least generate the docs locally and look at it
> before posting the patch. As Tim already said, sphinx is pretty
> strict in its syntax.
>
> There is one more alternative, I think - use Sphinx for docs
> generation, but keep the docstrings free-form (I assume there must be
> an option in Sphinx to do that). That way we lose some pretty
> formatting, but won't be forced to adhere to a particular syntax.

I put an example of the output from both sphinx-style docstrings and
freeform docstrings up on fedorapeople:

http://tflink.fedorapeople.org/taskotron/test-libtaskotron-docs/library.html

It sounds like the general consensus is that sphinx-style docstrings
are ugly but generate nice html output and it's not clear whether the
ugly-ness of the docstrings is worth the nice html api docs.

How do we want to decide which format to use going forward? Get the
docs started and try out the different docstring formats?

I'm +1 to using sphinx-style docstrings but could likely be persuaded
to use something different as long as it doesn't require too much
custom code. We have enough custom tools as it is and I'd rather use
something standard for api docs.

Tim
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