Anyone can contribute to the development of PyCogent, not just registered developers. If you figure out a solution to something using PyCogent that you’d like to share please post comments on the forums page at sourceforge and we’ll look at including your tips! If you have ideas for improving the current documentation, then we want to here from you so please post on the tracker page!
To grab PyCogent from the sourceforge subversion repository, do the following:
$ svn co https://pycogent.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pycogent/trunk PyCogent
To build the documentation or doctest the contents, you’ll need to install Sphinx. Assuming you have easy_install configured on your machine (and if not, download setuptools from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools and follow the instructions). Then grab Sphinx:
$ sudo easy_install -U sphinx
Generating the html form of the documentation requires changing into the doc directory and executing a make command:
$ cd path/to/PyCogent/doc
$ make html
... # bunch of output
Build finished. The HTML pages are in _build/html.
This prints a bunch of output to screen and creates a directory PyCogent/doc/_build and within that html. The index file PyCogent/doc/_build/html/index.html is the root of the documentation.
One can also generate a pdf file, using the Sphinx latex generation capacity. This is slightly more involved. (It also requires that you have an installation of TeTex.)
First generate the latex
$ make latex
... # bunch of output
Build finished; the LaTeX files are in _build/latex.
Run `make all-pdf' or `make all-ps' in that directory to run these through (pdf)latex.
then change into the latex dir and build the pdf
$ cd _build/latex
$ make all-pdf
You can now open PyCogent.pdf.
To actually test the documentation, you need to be in the doc directory and then execute another make command:
$ cd path/to/PyCogent/doc
$ make doctest
The results are in _build/doctest/output.txt.
Note
The documentation does not test for presence of 3rd party dependencies (such as applications or python modules) like the PyCogent unittest test suite. If you don’t have all the 3rd party applications installed you will see failures. At this point no effort is being expended to hide such failures.
You can maximise the cogent user experience for yourself and others by contributing to the documentation. If you solve a problem that you think might prove useful to others then add it into the documentation. If you can think of ways to improve the existing documents let us know.
For guidance on adding documentation, look at any of the existing examples. The restructured text format is pretty easy to write (for overview see the Sphinx rest overview). The conventions adopted by PyCogent are to use heading levels to be consistent with the Python.org standard (taken from Sphinx headings). They are
If it’s a use-case, create your file in the examples directory, giving it a .rst suffix. Link it into the documentation tree, adding a line into the examples/index.rst file. If it’s something you think should be added into the cookbook, add it into the appropriate cookbook document.
Things you should check before committing your new document:
Add a line at the beginning with yourself as author (.. sectionauthor:: My Name) so people can contact you with feedback.
Add any data files used in your documentation under PyCogent/doc/data/
Add a download link to those files to PyCogent/doc/data_file_links.rst following the style employed in that file.
Spellcheck!!
Check what you wrote is valid restructured text by building the documents for both html and latex. If your document isn’t connected into the table of contents, Sphinx will print a warning to screen.
Check you have correctly marked up the content and that it looks OK. Make sure that python code and shell commands are correctly highlighted and that literals are marked up as literals. In particular, check the latex build since it is common for text to span beyond the page margins. If the latter happens, revise your document!
Check that it works (rather than testing the entire suite, you can use the convenience script within doc). For instance, the following is a single test of one file:
$ cd path/to/PyCogent/doc
$ python doctest_rsts.py examples/reverse_complement.rst
Add todo’s into the rst files using the todo directive as in
.. todo::
some task
To see the list of todo’s in the project, uncomment the line that sets todo_include_todos=True in doc/conf.py, then cd into the doc/ and make the html docs again. The todo’s are listed on the main page.
Warning
Be sure to revert the conf.py file back to it’s original state so you don’t accidentally commit the change as this affects everyone else’s documentation too!