From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2006-10-15T20:09:42+09:00
Subject: Re: RDoc vs metaprogramming


On Oct 14, 2006, at 8:48 PM, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have developed a library to read and parse XSPF playlists. Most  
> of the
> methods (90%) are metagenerated using something like this:
>
> class XSPFBlah
>
>   attributes = %w{ attrib1 attrib2 }
>   attributes.each do |attrib|
>     define_method(attrib.to_sym) { do_something }
>   end
>
>   def initialize(source)
>     do something
>   end
> end
>
> RDoc does not find the metaprogrammed methods, therefore the  
> documentation is
> useless. Is there anything I could do to get RDoc to work?

I don't know what XSPF is so this might be a terribly ignorant  
question... but... what value do you get from having a bunch of  
redundant documentation for methods that presumably do mostly the  
same thing across the board? Which is worse, zero useless  
documentation or lots of useless documentation?

I generally don't bother documenting my generated accessors for  
exactly this reason. They're obvious and usually wouldn't benefit  
from doco.