From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2002-10-23T16:27:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby.bah! (was Re: XMLParser, NQXML... and also RAA.succ)

On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 03:32:56PM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> I have to be honest and say that I don't *get* why rubydoc *as a
> tool* is necessary. If you're going to make it an aggregator so that
> the user can have the equivalent of a single interface like users of
> the ActiveState Perl package do ... that's cool. If you're going to
> make it a super-duper version of ri with Rimport, even better! (See?
> I forgot another Ruby documentation tool.) But if it's just going to
> be Yet Another Documentation Tool, I've got to say that I don't see
> the point.

So far, neither ri nor rdoc or rd has all the features in place to
make any of them a clear winner. One viable approach is to write glue
code until we have a system that fills all our documentation needs -
but it might be quite an inconsistent patchwork by then. Just from the
initial description, rubydoc sounds like a decent core to build a
cleaner documentation system upon, but who knows for sure.

Regardless of the technical merits of rubydoc vs rdoc vs whatever, I
think it's healthy to explore different options to meet the needs of a
documentation system. Just as genetic recombination allows nature to
explore different survivability traits, I think we should encourage
experimentation for ruby projects -- especially if somebody is willing
to donate their time and effort to do so.

-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com