/Misc/NEWS.help

 1							-*- text -*-
 2
 3If you edited Misc/NEWS before it was converted to ReST format skimming this
 4file should help make the transition a bit easier.  For full details about
 5Docutils and ReST, go to the Docutils website:
 6
 7    http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
 8
 9To process Misc/NEWS using Docutils, you'll need the latest docutils
10snapshot:
11
12    http://docutils.sf.net/docutils-snapshot.tgz
13
14Docutils works with Python 2.2 or newer.
15
16To process NEWS into NEWS.html, first install Docutils, and then run
17this command:
18
19    python .../docutils/tools/rst2html.py NEWS NEWS.html
20
21Here ".../docutils" is the directory into which the above snapshot was
22extracted.  (I hope this recipe will change for the better.)
23
24David Goodger made a change to the allowable structure of internal
25references which greatly simplified initial conversion of the file.
26
27The changes required fell into the following categories:
28
29* The top-level "What's New" section headers changed to:
30
31    What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
32    =================================
33
34    *Release date: DD-MMM-2002*
35
36  Note that the release date line is emphasized, with a "*" at each
37  end.
38
39* Subsections are underlined with a single row of hyphens:
40
41    Type/class unification and new-style classes
42    --------------------------------------------
43
44* Places where "balanced" single quotes were used were changed to use
45  apostrophes as both the opening and closing quote (`string' -> 'string').
46
47* In a few places asterisks needed to be escaped which would otherwise have
48  been interpreted as beginning blocks of italic or bold text, e.g.:
49
50    - The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``"
51      to "``void (*)(void *)``".
52
53  Note that only the asterisks preceded by whitespace needed to be escaped.
54
55* One instance of a word ending with an underscore needed to be quoted
56  ("PyCmp_" became "``PyCmp_``").
57
58* One table was converted to ReST form (search Misc/NEWS for "New codecs"
59  for this example).
60
61* A few places where chunks of code or indented text were displayed needed
62  to be properly introduced (preceding paragraph terminated by "::" and the
63  chunk of code or text indented w.r.t. the paragraph).  For example:
64
65    - Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail!  This has always been true,
66      but no callers checked for it.  It's more likely to fail now,
67      because overflow errors are properly detected now.  The proper way
68      to check::
69
70          double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
71          if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
72              /* The conversion failed. */
73              }