Zope documentation with "pydoc"

Introduction

Python 2.1 comes with a great tool: pydoc, the Python documenter. It can extract documentation for all accessible Python packages, modules and classes. It uses the content of these objects (name, type, prototype) as well as docstrings and comments for the documentation.

Zope uses several non-standard Python features that confuse "pydoc". To let "pydoc" play well with "Zope" both need to change a bit.

I made some patches that form the starting steps for an integration. A bit more work would make the "pydoc" documentation for Zope even more valuable, e.g.:

• just listing inherited methods under their base class rather than documenting them each on a single line mixed with the new methods
• listing available objects in using modules rather than documenting them only in the defining modules

Patches

• "pydoc" patch, to be applied in lib/python2.1
• "Zope" patch, to be applied in Zope's distribution directory
• "pydoc" start script for Zope
  This script requires that PYTHONPATH/PYTHONHOME has been set up such that Zope and its infrastructure can be imported. It would probably be easier, to make it available directly from inside Zope.