On Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 23:11 Sandro Tosi wrote:
> Hello Kenneth,
>
> On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 10:36 PM Kenneth J. Pronovici
> wrote:
> > This is one of 20+ packages in the archive that still depend on Epydoc.
> I
> > have filed a bug with ftp.debian.org to have epydoc removed from
> unstable.
> > Besides its lack of support for Python 3, epydoc has been completely
> > unsupported upstream for close to a decade. It really should have been
> removed
> > from the archive years ago.
>
> while i appreciate your effort here, i dont believe there's any
> particular reason to jump the gun here.
>
Hey Sandro,
One way or another I need to get Epydoc out of the archive. It's got to
happen at some point, along with the python2 end-of-life transition that
has already started. Epydoc can't be converted to python3; I've already
tried, and it's too much work to be practical. So, it's better to just
stop using it now and move on.
You don't need to discard the API documentation from your package; you just
can't generate it at Debian package build time using epydoc. For instance,
upstream can include the pre-generated documentation in the distribution if
they would like to continue using Epydoc on their own, installed from the
upstream source. It just isn't viable to generate it in Debian any more.
In any case, I'm sorry if I sound impatient, but trying to do the right
thing here has cost me a lot of effort. This is one of the very few replies
I've gotten in the last 18 months, even though I have tried to be
proactive. I filed bugs, updated NEWS, etc. to basically no avail. For
whatever reason, I didn't find your package in my initial search.
At [1], I can offer you (or your upstream) a hack-ish script to convert
common Epydoc markup to Google-style docstrings. It's
not perfect, but it would get you much of the way toward working code.
Another alternative is to switch to pydoctor, which is mostly compatible
with epydoc markup. (I recently NMU'd that to remove the epydoc
dependency.). But, pydoctor is also dependent on python2, so switching
doesn't gain you much.
Bottom line: if someone is actually committed to making the transition away
from epydoc markup, I am happy to offer the time necessary to complete that
effort. But I don't want to wait indefinitely. I want to get ahead of the
python2 transition and get this package out of the archive relatively
soon. Otherwise we're just delaying the inevitable.
KEN
[1]
https://bitbucket.org/cedarsolutions/cedar-backup3/src/73037a2/util/sphinx-convert
>
>
