The 2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award for Services to the Python
Community has been awarded to Georg Brandl.
Georg has been a core contributor to CPython since 2005, contributing bug
fixes for compiler internals and modules such as pdb. His most
widely known contributions are to Python's documentation, through
writing as well as by creating and maintaining the Sphinx tool chain
for converting reStructuredText input files to more easily consumed
formats such as HTML and PDF.
The video announcing Georg's award at OSCON 2011 is available on YouTube.
Making Documentation Easier
Earlier versions of Python used LaTeX and a Perl-based tool-chain to
convert documentation into HTML and PDF. The reliance on Perl, and
the relative difficulty of contributing to LaTeX-formatted source
files, came up from time to time, but Georg was the one to finally
take on the problem of building the necessary tools to manage the
content in another format, and then converting all of the existing
files.
Georg studied the docutils project and decided that it met most of
the requirements, but needed a few custom markup features and a tool
to convert individual input files to a unified output document. He
wrote a tool called "doctools" for Python's documentation, which was
eventually re-christened to Sphinx "because of the build tool for
python.org, which was called Pyramid -- and unhappily without regard
to the two existing projects called Sphinx."
Over time, the user base for Sphinx grew beyond CPython's
documentation team, and Georg continues to work with other
contributors to make it more generally useful for other projects. For
example, some of the Python-centric features have been reorganized
with the recent addition of the "domains" system, allowing Sphinx to
be used for projects written in C, Java, and other languages just as
easily as Python.
When I asked him about Sphinx, Georg said,
Today I'm very happy and very proud of what the community has done
for documentation, also thanks to Sphinx: while Python itself always
had excellent docs, now extensive and usable docs are basically a
trademark of the whole Python community (just look at ReadTheDocs
or packages.python.org).
About Georg
Georg is a PhD student of Physics. He works at the Munich research
reactor slash neutron source on magnetism, researching novel materials
for the computing of tomorrow. He uses Python to control experiments
consisting of dozens of individual devices, and for teaching other
scientists how to do so efficiently. When he is not working on
Python-related projects, Georg likes to cycle and to cook.
About the Award
Since 2002, O'Reilly Media has presented the Frank Willison Award for
Contributions to the Python Community to someone who has done
outstanding work for the Python community. The award was established
in memory of Frank Willison, a Python enthusiast and O'Reilly
editor-in-chief, who died in July 2001. Previous recipients include
Christian Tismer (2010), Martin von Löwis (2008), and Steve Holden
(2007).
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