Rdoc with hyperlinks

More often than not, I find when browsing rdoc, that I need to see the
full source to answer questions - not just the excerpt.

It would be great if the file references in html rdoc could be
hyperlinks to the file location - not just plain text.

I took a look at rdoc source but couldn’t figure out how to make this
patch. Could anyone help me out?

[email protected] wrote:

More often than not, I find when browsing rdoc, that I need to see the
full source to answer questions - not just the excerpt.

It would be great if the file references in html rdoc could be
hyperlinks to the file location - not just plain text.

I took a look at rdoc source but couldn’t figure out how to make this
patch. Could anyone help me out?

In general, you should not rely on knowledge of the source code to
understand how a library works, because the library writer reserves
the right to change the behavior of things that are not specified in
the documentation.

–Ken B.

Ken B. wrote:

In general, you should not rely on knowledge of the source code to
understand how a library works, because the library writer reserves
the right to change the behavior of things that are not specified in
the documentation.

Ken - I certainly agree in theory. However, in practice, that is often
the only way to understand most Ruby libs. Ruby, as wonderful as it
is, has not reached the maturity where its libs come with stable,
complete documentation.

Check out libs like SOAP4R. The source is the documentation.

Also, I would find linking to the source useful for libs which we are
developing in house.

[email protected] wrote:

It would be great if the file references in html rdoc could be
hyperlinks to the file location - not just plain text.

I do this with my libraries. See this rdoc page:

http://phrogz.net/RubyLibs/OWLScribble/doc/index.html

which has a link to its own source file, and thus is self-documenting
on how to create documentation links to yourself. :slight_smile: