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authorSkip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com>2002-09-20 17:08:37 (GMT)
committerSkip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com>2002-09-20 17:08:37 (GMT)
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brief help file for people editing Misc/NEWS
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+ -*- text -*-
+
+If you edited Misc/NEWS before it was converted to ReST format skimming this
+file should help make the transition a bit easier. For full details about
+Docutils and ReST, go to the Docutils website:
+
+ http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
+
+To process Misc/NEWS using Docutils, you'll need the latest docutils
+snapshot:
+
+ http://docutils.sf.net/docutils-snapshot.tgz
+
+David Goodger made a change to the allowable structure of internal
+references which greatly simplified initial conversion of the file.
+
+The changes required fell into the following categories:
+
+* The top-level "What's New" section headers changed to:
+
+ What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
+ =================================
+
+ *XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
+
+* Subsections are underlined with a single row of hyphens:
+
+ Type/class unification and new-style classes
+ --------------------------------------------
+
+* Places where "balanced" single quotes were used were changed to use
+ apostrophes as both the opening and closing quote (`string' -> 'string').
+
+* In a few places asterisks needed to be escaped which would otherwise have
+ been interpreted as beginning blocks of italic or bold text, e.g.:
+
+ - The type of tp_free has been changed from "void (*)(PyObject \*)"
+ to "void (*)(void \*)".
+
+ Note that only the asterisks preceded by whitespace needed to be escaped.
+
+* One instance of a word ending with an underscore needed to be quoted
+ ("PyCmp_" became "``PyCmp_``").
+
+* One table was converted to ReST form (search Misc/NEWS for "New codecs"
+ for this example).
+
+* A few places where chunks of code or indented text were displayed needed
+ to be properly introduced (preceding paragraph terminated by "::" and the
+ chunk of code or text indented w.r.t. the paragraph). For example:
+
+ - Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true,
+ but no callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now,
+ because overflow errors are properly detected now. The proper way
+ to check: ::
+
+ double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
+ if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
+ /* The conversion failed. */
+ }