From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2003-12-27T15:30:23+09:00
Subject: The great ri conversion... :)

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We're in the middle of integrating RDoc/ri-style comments into the main 
interpreter sources (we being Michael Granger and me, with help from Ed 
Sinjiashvili). So far we're maybe 60% complete, and it's starting to 
look pretty good. You can check our progress at

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?StillToDo

If you want to play with the results (and you're on a Unix-based box)(*)

- check out a copy of the latest Ruby from CVS.
- build and install
- in the main Ruby directory (the one containing object.c etc), type

      rdoc --ri *.c

- then use 'ri' to browse the results

    ri Array
    ri Array.push

- You can get prettier output by enabling formatting

   ri -f bs  Array.select
   ri -f ansi MatchData

"-f bs" does formatting using overstrikes, and works with pagers such 
as "more" and "less." The "-f ansi" option uses ANSI escape sequences. 
To make these work with the "less" pager, you need to tell it to allow 
raw escape codes through. I run my version of less with the LESS 
environment variable set as follows:

    export LESS="-REX"

You can use RDoc as before to extract documentation from  your own 
classes (and from library classes). If you use the --ri option, this 
documentation will then be accessible via 'ri'.

Right now there are some holes, and I'll be adding features and fixing 
bugs over the next couple of weeks. I'm announcing this now to 
encourage people to play, find issues, and come up with things to 
improve. However, I'm not yet at the stage where I can deal with bugs 
reports and the like. Please play with all this stuff, and in a week or 
so I'll announce a release candidate, at which point I'll be soliciting 
as much feedback as I can get.


Cheers

Dave

(*) Why Unix only? Because I haven't even tried it on a Windows box 
yet. It might work, but then again... I _will_ try it at some point.

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