From: James Britt <james_b@...>
Date: 2006-03-19T13:47:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Core lib clean-up

James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Mar 18, 2006, at 7:59 PM, James Britt wrote:
> 
>> Trans wrote:
>>
>>>> Which is a standard library, not a core class.  It shouldn't be in
>>>> those docs at all.
>>>
>>> Thanks. So there are some issue with the docs themselves.
>>
>>
>> One being that people have to know whether something is 'core' or  
>> 'stdlib' when they look for it.
> 
> 
> I offered my best idea for an improvement to this some time ago on  the 
> Ruby Documentation list.  Did you not feel building an index page  
> grouped by functionality held any value James?

Please correct me if my recollection is off, but that would have been a 
manual process, no?  (My apologies if there was a more direct solution 
and I let it slip off my radar.)

Maintaining doc indices by hand is not really what I would encourage.

(Or else it's Yet Another Task Automation Challenge: parse the core + 
stdlb index files and merge them to create a master index.  Wish I had 
the time.)

When building Ruby with the " --include-docs" option, all the core & 
stdlib rdocs should get generated as one set, and ri populated with the 
full set of data, and the entries annotated to indicate core or not 
(though the docs themselves really should be clear on what exactly one 
would need to 'require' to use the code).   (On a side note, sort of a 
shame that docs are not installed by default.)

This may be possible (to some extent) after the installation is complete 
by running "rdoc --merge" over the full source tree, though the last 
time I tried that (a few months ago, I think) it quickly raised an error 
and quit.   (My experiment may have lacked rigor; if anyone has specific 
instructions on how to do this safely, with no risk of screwing my 
system or site ri files, please let me know.)




-- 
James Britt

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