README for the stdlib-doc Project

Introduction

This document gives a description and status report of the stdlib-doc project.

Further Reading

• doc/GettingStarted.txt
• doc/ProgrammersGuide.txt

You can find these among the project files, but since they’re in RDoc format, you’re better off generating the documentation or reading it at stdlib-doc.rubyforge.org.

Links

www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib

The latest online documentation, with the latest download available as well.

www.rubyforge.org/projects/stdlib-doc

The project page. Visit here for CVS instructions.

About the Project

stdlib-doc is a project to aid the documentation of Ruby’s standard library. Volunteers create such documentation via RDoc comments in the source code. stdlib-doc generates complete standard library documentation and makes it available for online viewing and for downloading. If you like, you can acquire the stdlib-doc software (CVS only) and generate it yourself.

How does this aid the documentation effort? It gives us encouragement that we’ve finally produced enough documentation to be worth publishing, and it makes it easy to see what’s lacking. For more detail on this, stdlib-doc also generates status reports on each file in the standard library. Sone reports are included in the generated documentation; others are available for separate generation.

See doc/GettingStarted.txt for a guide to running the software.

Status

Project History

2003 January

The project to document the standard libraries in their source code was born, with no resources other than a Wiki page.

2003 September

Work commenced on stdlib-doc: creating the status database and nutting out some command-line reports. Sidetracks aplenty.

2003-10-31

"The first scratchy results are online." A mostly hacked-up set of documentation, basically in its current form, was uploaded to RubyForge.

2003-11-16

The first good purely generated results were obtained. An alpha documentation tarball released on RubyForge. Much work needed on presentation.

2003-11-17

Code cleanup and documentation drive in preparation for re-release in CVS (the first repository was ungraciously dumped).

2003-11-30

Frantic rearranging of directories in a "final push" before making the CVS available. Struggling with CSS complexities for the generated documentation: looks great on IE and crap on everything else.

2003-12-08

Version 0.8.1 released with most CSS problems fixed and download available. Time to get back to documentation.

Current Status

2003-12-12:

• ruby-doc.org is now always hosting the latest documentation at www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/index.html. You can download the documentation for offline viewing from the same place.
• Online documentation has been removed from RubyForge; that was always a stop-gap until ruby-doc was set up.
• The CVS for this project is online.

Credits

William Webber has contributed the best and the most of the documentation. Handy contributions from Lyle Johnson have helped as well. James Britt has sorted out ruby-doc.org hosting.

Quite a few standard library files contain decent, or better, English documentation by their authors. I am very grateful for those coders who have made the effort, especially when it wasn’t in their first language.

Licence

The code and data contained in the rubyforge.org/projects/stdlib-doc package was created by Gavin Sinclair (gsinclair at soyabean.com.au) and is licenced under the same terms as Ruby (www.ruby-lang.org/en). Standard disclaimer applies.