From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2003-12-12T03:20:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Doc Vision (was Re: Docs for Socket, OpenSSL, etc)


On Dec 11, 2003, at 11:50, James F. Hranicky wrote:

> I'm probably opening up a big/old can of worms, right now it seems that
> there are several sources of documentation for Ruby, all with different
> areas covered. What is the ultimate vision for ruby docs? rd? ri? rdoc?
> ruby-doc.org? pickaxe? The only thing php or perl have over Ruby IMO is
> their docs are standardized: perldoc blah (even man blah...yay!),
> or http://www.php.net/manual/en .

The vision I'm personally moving towards is RDoc/ri integration. RDoc 
is convenient for writing internal documentation, and folks are already 
adding it to the standard library. Within a couple of weeks, I'll have 
it integrated with ri, so you'll be able to pull up any RDoc'd 
documentation using ri (or something very similar to ri). For example, 
saying

    ri Socket

will list all the classes and modules that contain the word Socket in 
their name, and

   ri accept

will show you all the 'accept' methods that RDoc knows about. As this 
is part of RDoc, and as RDoc is now included in Ruby core, this should 
shortly be available pretty much universally.


Cheers

Dave