From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2008-07-09T03:19:23+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby gems doc indexer

On Jul 7, 2008, at 15:27 PM, Roger Pack wrote:
> Eric Hodel wrote:
>> On Jul 7, 2008, at 14:44 PM, Roger Pack wrote:
>>> Don't know if this would be useful for anyone, but I wrote a utility
>>> to create an html index of the rdoc's of installed rubygems on your
>>> system.
>>
>> How is this different from running `gem server` and navigating to  
>> that
>> URL in your browser?
>
> In all honesty, I didn't know gem server existed, and, also  
> honestly, it
> didn't make sense for me that gem server would be necessary for  
> browsing
> an index of rdoc's.
>
> My 'wish' would be something like this run automatically after
> installing new rdoc's:
>
> gem install package
> ...
> package installed
> updated index gem_rdoc_index.html
>
> It just makes more sense than having to run a server to browse rdoc's.
>
> Thoughts?
> I'd be happy to code it up as a patch :)


`gem server` is already a well-known way to access documentation.  It  
provides a --daemon option so you can start it and forget about it.   
(It updates itself as new gems are installed.)

This is an entirely new way of accessing the same information that  
isn't going to be well-known.  Furthermore, the path to this file is  
either going to be in an obscure location to support multiple users,  
or only accessible by one user.

I don't want to maintain two different ways of accessing the same  
information.