sphinxcontrib-programoutput and sphinx-autorun

[WhyNotHugo]

Hey! I'm the maintainer for sphinx-autorun, and it seems that we've quite a bit overlap. (Your docs seem to be far more complete though!)

I'm wondering if you're willing to discuss merging both packages into one single project, to avoid both duplicating efforts.

[jamadden]

sphinx-autorun looks like an interesting project! Thank you for bringing this up for discussion.

This project is constrained by backwards-compatibility requirements to maintain its existing name, directives, and output (there was a large enough group of existing users of this project that when it vanished from PyPI people got upset---that's when we took over maintenance and committed to keep it working). I wouldn't entirely rule out adding additional directives, but the association of what this project does is fairly strong, and I would imagine that people would be surprised to find (if they find) directives that deal with other things, like running doctest-like snippets, here. I suspect this project would be better off focusing on that area. (To me, the Unix philosophy of "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features'" seems to complement the Python Zen of "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." UPDATE: I neglected to add: If there's a good way to implement the next part of the Unix philosophy, "Make programs work together", without adding too much coupling, that could be worth considering.)

[WhyNotHugo]

I agree mostly -- do one thing and do it well.

I guess it's just that how anyone defines "one thing" might vary. I'd actually though of this as "runs a code block and includes the output" (a bash code block), while sphinx-autorun does the same but has both "bash code blocks" and "python code block", so it's just the runner[s] that change.

I'm probably biased though because I first saw it from sphinx-autorun's point of view.