One Step Back

Does anyone know why the recently released Core Doc for Ruby 1.8.5 contains a flood of classes from the Standard Library (which is also documented separately)?

It's resulted in a serious loss of usability. Now when I need documentation on the core classes that really matter (classes like Array, Class, Enumerable, File, Hash, IO, Regexp, String, and Thread), I have to wade through a mess of DRb, Generators, IXMLDOM, Net, RDoc, REXML, RI, RSS, Resolv, Rinda, RubyToken, SM, SOAP, Test, WEBrick, WSDL, XSD, YAML, and Zlib.

All of which are great (except SOAP and WSDL -- ugh ;-). I just liked it better when they were documented separately in the Standard Library docs.

Some kind of fancy AJAX search interface to the RDocs might take the edge off here, but I'd still like to be able to browse just the most important classes. I hope we don't lose that ability forever.

For some perspective, here's the number of classes (+/- one or two) documented in the Core RDoc for the past three releases of Ruby.

1.8.3: 167
1.8.4: 181
1.8.5: 1325

Yikes!

posted on: 12/11/2006 | path: /tech