[Debichem-devel] Bug#881562: rdkit: Please migrate away from Epydoc if possible

[Kenneth Pronovici]

Source: rdkit
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

If possible, please consider moving away from the use of Epydoc in your
package.  Epydoc is basically unmaintained upstream.  Also, it is only
supported for Python 2, so it will reach its end of life along with
Python 2 sometime in 2020.

I will continue to maintain the Epydoc packages in Debian as long as I
can, acting as de facto upstream.  However, once Python 2 is unsupported
in Debian, I'm not sure that we'll have too many options to keep it
alive.  Migrating it to Python 3 is a fairly large job that I don't
have the time or the expertise to take on right now.

For my own Python code, I have recently converted to Sphinx using the
Napolean plugin.  At [1], I can offer you (or your upstream) a hack-ish
script to convert common Epydoc markup to Google-style docstrings. It's
not perfect, but it would get you much of the way toward working code.

Thanks,

Ken (maintainer for python-epydoc)

[1] https://bitbucket.org/cedarsolutions/cedar-backup3/src/73037a2/util/sphinx-convert