From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-10-23T16:59:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby.bah! (was Re: XMLParser, NQXML... and also RAA.succ)

From: "Alan Chen" <alan@digikata.com>


> 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.

rd and rdoc are in competition, and I'd like to see rdoc swallow rd whole: that
is, understand its markup and include rd files in the overall presentation.

But ri is different.  It's a viewer.  At the moment, its data (from whence its
output springs) is in a private format.  And the only thing it documents is
built-in classes.  However, it's a wonderful little program, and remeber, at
its core it is only a viewer.

The Ruby Documentation Project (on a separate mailing list) is attempting to
unite ri with other documentation programs, among other things.  That's what
RImport is about: allow RDoc documentation to be viewed piecemeal through ri.

Gavin