Thursday, December 13, 2007

Generating rdoc for gems that refuse to generate docs

I recently upgraded to capistrano 2.1, and it's woefully lacking in documentation. Jamis Buck had already picked a documentation coordinator about a month ago, but nothing seemed to be happening since.

So it was time to go dumpster diving in cappy code. I at least wanted to see what the standard variables were. To my surprise, there were some docs in code, but I couldn't generate it with

gem rdoc capistrano

For those of us that had never made a gem, all you have to do to force it to is to edit the associated specification for the gem (/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/), and add

s.has_rdoc = true

Maybe if I dig enough stuff out of it, I'll pose some prelim documentation for cappy 2.1 and donate it to the documentation effort.

As an aside and musing, ideally, the code itself would be documentation. However, just because you're reading code, doesn't mean that you can get the overall picture of how to use it. Even if you filtered out the details, and saw just the class and method declarations, that still wouldn't be enough since you can't see how things fit together. I don't know what a good solution would be. The simplest API is often complex enough to be nearly useless without good documentation.

Small tip!

1 comment:

  1. We have begun to release the documentation into the wild.

    Go to www.capify.org/documentation/ to enjoy the wordy goodness!

    ReplyDelete