The PyFAQ Process

Step 1: Using the Site to Collect Comments #

For the moment, the PyFAQ zone is used to collect comments for existing FAQ entries (and suggestions for new entries, and other improvements).

To use this information, we can simply generate a list of comments, and let someone with SVN access to the python.org sources update the official FAQ.

(one could write a script that posts comment summaries to the python.org tracker)

Step 2: Using the Site to Maintain the FAQ #

Another option is to generate the python.org FAQ from the material on this site:

• The easiest way to do this is to generate XHTML fragments based on the site contents and the (autogenerated) indexes. I don’t know if the python.org build tools can handle XHTML fragments yet, but that cannot be too hard to fix… (just skip the ReST rendering step if the document is marked as text/xml, or starts with a <, or something like that).

• Converting to ReST outside the python.org toolchain is more work, but could be worth investigating further.

(However, the conversion process needs to be somewhat improved before we can start working on this. The main problem right now appears to be that HTML2TEXT doesn’t always escape underscore characters. That shouldn’t be too hard to fix…)

Step 3: Creating a FAQ Web Application for www.python.org #

To be added. (I have some ideas, but if you know what the perfect FAQ application should look like, or have pointers to some nice site to imitate, don’t hesitate to add a comment below…)