How does Python's website generate its online documentation?

Question

Created using Sphinx 0.6.5.

I know Python's documentation uses reStructuredText, but it has different sections like http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html and http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html.

How do you do this in reStructuredText? Do you run rst2html in a bunch of directories, keeping its structure?

I know that it uses Sphinx (not rst2html directly as said by Thomas Wouters in an answer), but how you should organize your rst structure with source code files in a repository so you have a full blown automated doc website?

Answer 1

The Python documentation uses reST for its markup, but it generates the HTML using sphinx, not rst2html directly. The sphinx tool is what converts all the individual .rst files into multiple .html files. To see how the Python docs are generated, see http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Doc/Makefile

Answer 2

I found the sampledoc tutorial on the matplotlib site quite useful to get started with Sphinx.

Answer 3

Here is how to build Python documentation exactly.