From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T23:09:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

James F. Hranicky wrote:
>>3. last but not least, online docs on Ruby's primary website (not 
>>3rd-party websites) that is similar to those provided by PostgreSQL and 
>>Python. Maybe we can volunteer to create 'official' ruby docs to be 
>>hosted on ruby's primary website.  Preferably using a popular 
>>documentation format that does not use frames like these:
> 
> 
> I know I'm getting into this late, but how about if each module came
> with it's own ri documentation, similar to perl's perldoc. 

Well, they sort of already do, as ri data comes via rdoc'ing the source 
code.  That's how the std-lib docs were generated.

> 
> I know being able to do this
> 
> 	ri Socket
> 	ri OpenSSL
> 	ri Net::SSH


Possible, if you run
   rdoc  --ri-site
or
   rdoc  --ri-system
(though I'm unclear on when you would pick one or the other)
on the standard library source.

But I believe there are side-effects on the main ri data files when 
standard lib files add to, or modify, core classes, and you run rdoc/ri 
on the whole standard lib tree.


> 
> would be great.
> 
> I think this, coupled with an up-to-date syntax manual would be a
> huge boost to Ruby acceptance. 

Certainly it would be a help if standard ri by default included both the 
core classes as well as those in the standard library.



James