Over the weekend- I had the urge to see what all commands are available for working with Python- so, I typed 'py' and pressed a TAB:
pycentral pygettext python py_compilefiles pygettext2.5 python2.5 pydoc pysupport-movemodules pyversions pydoc2.5 pysupport-parseversions
Using pydoc:
pydoc is a documentation generator, well described at http://docs.python.org/lib/module-pydoc.html . Here are my 2 cents, (decorated with screenshots) 
$ pydoc -p 9090 pydoc server ready at http://localhost:9090
starts a web server to serve documentation for Python modules, and can be accessed remotely using the (hostname, port):
You can stop the server using a ctrl + c
pydoc -g brings up a Tk-basd GUI which you can use to search for module documentation:
pyversions
pyversions with its various switches can be used to print information about installed, supported, default runtimes. For eg.
# print default Python version to be used amit@ubuntu804-book:~$ pyversions -d python2.5 # print installed Python versions amit@ubuntu804-book:~$ pyversions -i python2.4 python2.5 # print supported Python versions amit@ubuntu804-book:~$ pyversions -s python2.4 python2.5
You can also get only the version numbers by adding a '-v' switch as in:
amit@ubuntu804-book:~$ pyversions -v -d 2.5
pyversions can also be used to parses the information of the PythonVersion fields in the package control file. ( I would appreciate some insight into this)
Some other miscellaneous utitlituies :
- py_compilefiles
- pygettext (deprecated);Recommended: xgettext
Footnotes
-
As you must have noticed, there are same utilities with version information and without version information like- python and python2.5, pydoc and pydoc2.5. Actually, in both cases python and pydoc is actually linked to /usr/bin/python2.5 and /usr/bin/pydoc2.5:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2008-07-02 23:15 /usr/bin/python -> python2.5 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2008-07-02 23:15 /usr/bin/pydoc -> pydoc2.5
- In Debian flavors, the file /usr/share/python/debian_defaults contains information about the Python versions on the system. For eg.
amit@ubuntu804-book:~$ cat /usr/share/python/debian_defaults [DEFAULT] # the default python version default-version = python2.5 # all supported python versions supported-versions = python2.4, python2.5 # formerly supported python versions old-versions = python2.3 # unsupported versions, including older versions unsupported-versions = python2.3
Refer: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/
