Dieter Maurer wrote:

Recently, I read the "Interface Wiki". It covers most of the methods contained in the API and its permission descriptions made a very solid impression. Maybe, you can start from these descriptions.

The Interfaces Wiki is actually where all the API documention did come from. Are there inconsistencies?

It might also not be optimal wrt. maintainability that the modules, their classes and their methods with the respective docstrings have been recreated just for API documentation purposes. Probably, it would be preferable to use the docstrings and the method prototypes from the source directly. You might still want to control with methods are described in the API and in which order. Personally, I would control this, too, inside the source documentation (a la javadoc), but I can imagine that an external configuration might be advantageous.

Yes, there are pros and cons on both sides, and Amos, Jim and I had some long converstations about this very subject. We decided to go with seperate documentation instead of autogenerating it because: 1. An interface should be a contract, not just an artifact of the code. 2. Python, being without first class support for interfaces, has no clear way of spelling an interface of a class. 3. Jim is working on formal interface support for python and he's thinking hard about it, we definatly didn't want to think hard about it and then turn out we came up with a bad answer, the existing API docs are just that, docs, not interfaces. When format interfaces come about, API docs will probably be converted to that format. Thanks for the comments! -Michel