From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2004-01-01T00:00:48+09:00
Subject: Re: rdoc: how to generate rdoc & ri documentation of standard library?


On Dec 31, 2003, at 6:11, Andreas Schwarz wrote:

> how can I generate rdoc & ri documentation of the standard library? I
> tried "cd /usr/local/lib/ruby; rdoc", but had to cancel it because rdoc
> tried eating up all my RAM (120MB when I killed it). Is this normal, or
> am I doing something wrong?

If you just let it run in the standard library, it will document 
absolutely everything it finds (which is probably not what you want, as 
most of the larger library modules have tons of internal classes and 
methods which don't really belong in the documentation). I ran that 
here last night, and it took about 15 minutes to complete.

To get something more meaningful, start in the Ruby source tree (not 
the installed library) and issue the command

       rdoc --ri *.c lib/*.rb

That will document (in ri form) the built-in functions and all the 
direct standard library classes. It'll take a minute or two, but when 
it's done, you'll be able to say

    ri  Array
    ri CGI
    ri Tempfile::open

and so on. In fact, on my box, you'll have at least some kind of 
documentation for 325 classes and 2300 methods.

To get standard rdoc documentation in HTML format, run command

     rdoc --op <somedir>  *.c lib/*.rb

If you're on a Unix box, I recommend using the prettier output:

    export LESS="-REX"    # allow escape sequences through
    ri -f ansi Array


STANDARD DISCLAIMER:

This is still a work in progress. Many of the library files have not 
yet been documented in RDoc format. Some of the constructs in these 
files cause RDoc to issue warnings. We're working on it.


Cheers

Dave