collective.checkdocs 0.2

collective.checkdocs adds new distutils commands checkdocs and showdocs to validate restructured text in long_description field of Python eggs. This package aims to make Python egg help page publishing and editing easier.

Eggs’ long description field, which is usually also the README.txt file of the package, is reST formatted text. This text is converted to HTML to show on the package page when package is published in distribution repositories like PyPI or plone.org. Unfortunately, since repositories do poor job to validate incoming reST text, errors in the text will result to broken published package pages.

Unpublishing is usually very cumbersome. We save our time by validating reST input using checkdocs and showdocs commands before submitting eggs to PyPi.

easy_install collective.checkdocs

python setup.py checkdocs
<string>:4: (WARNING/2) Inline literal start-string without end-string.
error: long_description had reST syntax errors

python setup.py showdocs
running showdocs
reST to HTML conversion available at at http://localhost:6969/ - press CTRL+C to interrupt