On Apr 4, 2005, at 16:13, Lee Cullens wrote:
On Apr 4, 2005, at 10:34 AM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
Personally I think these little package idiosyncrasies are what discourage non-hacker users and businesses that might otherwise advance the use of Python, to the benefit of those that have enough experience and skills to prepare and maintain a presentable tool - but we all have a perfect right to our own priorities and outlook.
On Apr 4, 2005, at 10:17, Lee Cullens wrote:
One thing I noticed with your 2.4.1 build is that in the PythonIDE Help menu "Python Documentation" and "Lookup in Python Documentation" are dimmed out (not available). Such in the 2.3 PythonIDE is still available though.
This time I did look in the Mac Python FAQ first, but the suggestion there did not remedy the problem.
I have no idea. If it's broken, it's broken in the source -- I didn't do it. I don't use PythonIDE, so I'm not really interested in tracking it down myself.
I'm not sure I agree with "advance the use of Python". These sorts of people don't generally contribute much back in my experience. They might have "advanced uses for Python", but probably aren't doing anyone else favors. Nobody is paid to make Python on Mac OS X suitable for new users. Those who are (teachers, etc.) haven't bothered to contribute any patches (recently, anyway) as far as I can tell.
Complaining to the tune of "if you don't do this, people won't use Python" isn't going to make anyone do anything. Personally, my top priorities for Python on Mac OS X are to make sure that it works, that I can do everything I want to do with it, and to make sure functionality is available so that people who know what they're doing can get things done. Catering to new users is not a priority of *mine*. Note that there are other people that work on this stuff and might feel differently.
I (so far) am using PythonIDE as a simple higher level (than the terminal) alternative. IDLE uses cr line endings instead of the Unix lf which has caused me some annoyances, and though I versonized wxPython so I could get SPE to run I find it has a way to go yet (at least on a Mac OS X platform). Neither am I ready yet to invest in Wing till I get up to speed in this "neighborhood" and I'm watching where Xcode might go.
IDLE's line encoding setting can't be changed?
Anyway, I looked at the two versions (2.3 and 2.4) of the PythonIDE package and at PytyhonIDEMain.py in particular. There is a self labeled hack in PytyhonIDEMain.py for building the Help menu (telling the Help Viewer about the Python documentation) that looks in two different places. In the 2.3 MacPython version there is an additional resource that satisfies the search, namely Contents/Resources/English.lproj. In the 2.4 version that resource is missing. The other place it looks is in the Python application inside the framework and I haven't tracked that down yet in the 2.3 version to see if it is there also, but it is obviously not there in the 2.4 version. Copying the 2.3 resource into 2.4 would result in 2.3 documentation for the 2.4 version so such is no solution.
So somewhere along the line from the Mac 2.3 version to your Mac 2.4 version the documentation resource was overlooked or dropped for some other reason. Maybe someone has an idea how I could remedy the situation (?) and in the meantime I'll continue developing my skills in this "neighborhood" till I understand enough to solve the issue without screwing something else up.
Unfortunately I'm going to be quite busy for the next week or two, and probably won't be able to research this further. If somebody finds a specific fix, I might be able to do something about it.
-bob
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