(I'm the maintainer for epydoc.) I took a pass through the pydoctor code. The epydoc module is imported in pydoctor/html.py, where it's an optional import:
try: from epydoc.markup import epytext EPYTEXT = True except: print "no epytext found" EPYTEXT = False Later on, in the doc2html() method, the code checks EPYTEXT and falls back on a boring docstring implementation ("Generate an HTML representation of a docstring in a really boring way") if the module isn't available. This file has a docstring which says "The old HTML generator. Deprecated, do not use", so it may not be relevant. The epydoc module is also imported in pydoctor/epydoc2stan.py: def get_parser(formatname): try: mod = __import__('epydoc.markup.' + formatname, globals(), locals(), ['parse_docstring']) except ImportError, e: return None, e else: return mod.parse_docstring, None Like html.py, epydoc2stan.py falls back on a boring docstring method if get_parser() returns None. Based on this analysis, it seems to me that epydoc isn't a strict dependency for pydoctor. I think that pydoctor should still continue to work even without the epydoc module available, albeit with somewhat different output. Given that epydoc does not work properly in Python 3, and it's beyond my capabilities to fix it, there aren't too many options here. Either we remove pydoctor's dependency on epydoc, or we remove pydoctor from the archive. I don't see any evidence that upstream is developing a Python 3 version of this code. This means that python-pydoctor will have to be removed from the archive eventually. Maybe now is the time to do it? Otherwise, I will see if I can determine how well the package works without epydoc installed. If it works (i.e. doesn't blow up) and I don't hear back with other instructions, I will eventually NMU my changes to remove the epydoc dependency. Given that I haven't gotten any replies for more than 18 months now, I won't wait that long before doing this NMU. KEN -- Kenneth J. Pronovici <prono...@debian.org>