Bug of the Day: issue 18036 (closed)ΒΆ

A while back I noticed that the FAQ entry for “How do I create a .pyc file?” was out of date, since it didn’t take into account the changes made by PEP 3147. A couple people stepped up and offered patches to update the docs. Today I picked one and elaborated on it a bit: linking to the PEP, and adding a note about PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE, which didn’t exist when that FAQ entry was last updated (it was added in 2.6).

Lately we’ve been trying to move away from the PEPs being the documentation for the features they introduce, since the PEPs are pretty much frozen once made final. Instead we want to document the feature, as actually implemented, in the regular docs. Unless I missed it, PEP 3147 hasn’t received that treatment yet, probably partially because the feature operates behind the scenes as far as most users of Python are concerned. As I noted on issue 18036 (closed), that FAQ entry is probably no longer “frequent” by even the most relaxed definition.

Still, until someone steps up to write the “real” docs for PEP 3147, the updated FAQ entry is better than the status quo ante.

Since this was a “simple” doc issue, I also closed a couple of bonus simple issues today: issue 19975 (closed), by Claudio Popa, which removes some now-unused imports from the webbrowser module, and issue 19970 (closed), by Vajrasky Kok, which fixes some comment typos.