Documentation Community Team Meeting (July 2, 2024)

Roll call

(Name / @GitHubUsername [/ Discord, if different])

  • Daniele Procida @danieleprocida

  • Carol / @willingc

  • Ned Batchelder / @nedbat

  • Ezio Melotti / @ezio-melotti

  • Petr Viktorin / @encukou

  • Jim DeLaHunt / @JDLH

  • Ryan / @ryan-duve

  • Hugo van Kemenade / @hugovk

  • Trey

Introductions

If there are any new people, we should do a round of introductions.

Reports and celebrations

60 second updates on things you have been up to, questions you have, or developments you think people should know about. Please add yourself, and if you do not have an update to share, you can pass.

This is a place to make announcements (without a need for discussion). This is also a great place to give shout-outs to contributors! We’ll read through these at the beginning of the meeting.

Discussion

  • [Daniele] Options for hosting a Python documentation sprint (Cardiff or London, possibly Netherlands)

    • Daniele ran a successful docs sprint @ DjangoCon.

      • People choose anything that bothers you in the docs, determine the rule it breaks, choose what you’d do right now to fix it. Daniele can “bless” the idea, or not; if blessed the person can work on it.

      • Some commits made it into the docs

    • Daniele can arrange a sprint in one of the 3 locations

    • [Ned] A sprint doesn’t have to be a big formal thing; it can be a meetup

    • [Daniele] Some formal structure helped

    • [Ned] You don’t need special permission

    • [Daniele] Would a core dev be interested in joining?

      • Possibly: Alex, Pradyun, Tania Allard, Petr

    • [Hugo] Last year Daniele led the workshop & Hugo was clicking the merge button at the sprint, worked very well

    • [Petr] worried about the conference helping to get people to the event

    • [Carol] The packaging guide (Python Packaging User Guide) could also use some work

    • [Ned] interested in the idea spreadsheet; maybe it can help even offline

    • [Carol] At last PyCon US, Shauna and Melanie tried to make their first docs PR, and found some issues in the onboarding process

Python Project Documentation

Relating to docs.python.org, peps.python.org, devguide.python.org, etc.

  • [Ryan] I need to load JSON with NaN values. The official documentation says:

    parse_constant, if specified, will be called with one of the following strings: '-Infinity', 'Infinity', 'NaN'. This can be used to raise an exception if invalid JSON numbers are encountered.

    • I could not tell how to use this, or even if it is what I needed, until I Googled it and found this example on Stack Overflow.

    • As a user, I intend to open a thread on Discourse before making a PR. But is there a more open conversation we should have about examples within documentation for docs.python.org, first?

    • You don’t need a discussion; file an issue and send a PR.

  • [Hugo] Re: avoiding duplicate deprecations across What’s New files: Discourse

    • PR python/cpython#121241 makes a start by moving pending removals from “What’s New in 3.13” into includes

  • [Petr] .. versionadded:: next: python/cpython#121277

  • [Ned] Positional-only arguments: python/cpython#121197

    • What needs EB pronouncement

    • Can we help people understand terse punctuation?

      • add a tooltip? That won’t work on mobile & screen readers

        • still better than nothing for non-mobile users

      • make it a link?

        • first make sure there’s a good place to link to

      • make sure searching for / gets you to the right place?

      • [Daniele] Documentation on how to read the documentation isn’t good

    • Ned to write this down