From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-03-17T01:10:29+09:00
Subject: Re: argh! more undocumented mysteries: to_yaml

On Sunday 16 March 2008, Tim Hunter wrote:
> Stefano Crocco wrote:
> > How are you supposed to know that to_yaml is not in ruby core but in the
> > standard library? I don't really know. When I started using ruby some
> > years ago, I downloaded a version of the rdoc documentation from
> > www.ruby-doc.org which only included documentation for the core classes
> > (that is, those you can use without need to require some files), while
> > documentation for the standard library was in a separate package.
> > Unfortunately, the documentation you can find nowadays includes both core
> > and standard library.
>
> The ri command shows the documentation for the merged core and standard
> libraries. It's sad but it's true. However, it isn't hard to find out
> what's the the core and what isn't.
>
> This link http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ has a link to the
> top-level www.ruby-doc.org as well as individual links to the core and
> standard API sections of ruby-doc.
>
> When I go to www.ruby-doc.org right now, the documentation for the Core
> API is clearly separated from the documentation for the Standard API.
> The yaml library is documented in the Standard API documentation.

As far as I can see, the links to the 'Core documentation' on both www.ruby-
doc.org and http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ point to the same 
documentation, which sadly contains both the core and the standard library. As 
you say, the standard library is also documented in its own section, which is 
much more organized, and easy to use.

Stefano