From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-12-31T06:49:48+09:00
Subject: Re: rdoc in rails

Roeland Moors wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 31, 2004 at 01:35:59AM +0900, Roeland Moors wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 04:48:14AM +0900, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:
>>
>>>>Would it be difficult (possible) to make a generator for rdoc that
>>>>generates the rdoc in a database format?
>>>
>>>I think RDoc already generates the data in YAML, doesn't it? I too 
>>>would love to see a Rails application that could import a YAML set of 
>>>definitions and provide a php.net-like doc portal with comments and 
>>>searching. That would surely be nice.
>>
>>I don't think it generates YAML, but it does generate XML. I'm
>>trying to adjust the XML generator to a SQL generator. At the
>>moment it looks like that isn't really a problem...
>>
> 
> I was wrong about the YAML output. The RI generator generates
> YAML files.

Question for Dave Thomas (and my apologies if I've asked this before):

How stable is the file format for the ri YAML data?

A few months ago, on a train ride to Munich, I wrote some code that 
grabbed ri data and stuffed it into a Madeleine instance, with  a 
WEBrick front end (probably via Catapult), so that one could get a sort 
of ri Web service that spit back ri data in XML.

It got lost in the shuffle of traveling and then working, but I should 
go dig it up.

I think one of my concerns was that neither the Ri API nor the YAML file 
format was stable, so I wanted some intermediate service that would 
reliably emit a known (to me, at least) XML format.  Then, if and when 
th ri internals changed, I could change the service code, but clients 
would be unaffected.

I also started adding in the means for indexing and retrieving ri data 
in foreign (i.e.m non-English) languages.

Somewhere on my hard drive ...



Thanks,

James